Top 10 Poker Apps for Running a Home Game

“Poker app” covers three completely different jobs: running the tournament, timing the blinds, and working out who owes whom at the end of the night. Most lists mix them together, which is why so many hosts download a blind timer expecting it to track a league. This is ten apps and tools worth having, grouped by the job they actually do, with an honest note on where each one stops.

The comparison at a glance

Tool	Best for	Platform	Free option	Clock	Players	Leagues
The Club House	Tournaments, leagues and clubs	Web, mobile, TV	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Blind Valet	Free cloud clock with league features	Web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
The Tournament Director	Deep, highly configurable desktop control	Windows	Trial	Yes	Yes	Yes
Poker Hawk	Putting the clock on every screen in the room	Web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
LynxPoker	Events with dealers and floor staff	Web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Ultimate Holdem Timer	A clock with nothing to set up	Web	Yes	Yes	No	No
PokerBoss	Running a tournament from an iPhone	iOS	Paid	Yes	Yes	Limited
Poker Timer apps	Offline blind timing on a phone	iOS / Android	Yes	Yes	No	No
Splitwise / Settle Up	Cash game debts at the end of the night	iOS / Android / web	Yes	No	No	No
Free web calculators	Structures and payouts before the night	Web	Yes	No	No	No

1. The Club House

Best for: home games that have become regular, and leagues or clubs that need results to carry across a season.

The Club House is a web-based system covering the whole tournament rather than only the clock: structures saved as templates, player registration, rebuys and add-ons, seating and table balancing, payouts calculated from the live prize pool, and league standings that update as results are recorded. It runs on a TV for the room and on players’ phones at the same time.

Strengths: the operational parts most tools leave out (seating, table management, league scoring and history) are in the same place as the clock. Limitations: it is cloud-based, so it assumes an internet connection at the venue, and it is more system than a one-off game needs. Price: free plan available; paid plans add higher limits and club features.

2. Blind Valet

Best for: hosts who want a capable free clock with league tracking and are happy in a browser.

Blind Valet is a cloud-based tournament manager covering the clock, a blind structure calculator, a payout calculator, player registration, seating and eliminations, and league rankings. Its own site describes it as used in over 100 countries and translated into 40-plus languages, and staff can handle seating and eliminations from mobile devices while players follow blinds and leaderboards on their phones.

Strengths: a genuinely useful free tier and very wide language coverage. Limitations: the interface carries a lot of history, and some capabilities sit behind a paid plan. Price: free to start, with monthly and annual plans available.

3. The Tournament Director

Best for: hosts who want total control and do not mind a Windows PC at the venue.

The Tournament Director is long-established desktop software with an unusually deep feature set: limit, pot-limit and no-limit games, prize calculation with guaranteed pots and house contributions, a player and league database, suggested blind structures and prize schedules, and customisable hotkeys. Almost every screen can be reconfigured.

Strengths: configurability nothing else matches, and it runs entirely offline. Limitations: Windows only, and the learning curve is real, expect to spend an evening setting it up. Price: a personal licence is $39.99 and a commercial licence $199.99 per year, with a 30-day evaluation period.

4. Poker Hawk

Best for: hosts who want the clock, payouts and standings visible on every screen in the room.

Poker Hawk is a web-based tournament manager aimed at home games and clubs, with the clock, payouts and standings pushed live to players’ devices as well as the main display.

Strengths: the multi-screen, player-facing approach is its clearest differentiator. Limitations: a smaller and newer product than the established names, so there is less community material to fall back on. Price: a free tier is available, with paid plans above it.

5. LynxPoker

Best for: events that have actual staff, dealers, a floor, more than a couple of tables.

LynxPoker separates the roles, with dedicated floor and dealer web apps alongside the main tournament clock, plus player analytics, bounty and mystery bounty support, and right-to-left and multilingual interfaces.

Strengths: the dealer and floor apps are unusual and genuinely useful once an event has staff. Limitations: that structure is overhead for a kitchen-table game. Price: free tier available; check current plan pricing.

6. Ultimate Holdem Timer

Best for: a clock you can have running in ninety seconds.

A free browser-based poker timer with blind and payout calculators, no account required, and no ads or trackers. It does one job.

Strengths: nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Limitations: no player tracking, no league, no seating. It is a clock. Price: free.

7. PokerBoss

Best for: running a small tournament entirely from an iPhone or iPad.

An iOS tournament manager covering the clock, players, rebuys and payouts on a phone or tablet.

Strengths: works well when the only device at the venue is a phone. Limitations: iOS only, and a phone screen is a poor tournament display for a room. Price: paid app; check the App Store for current pricing.

8. Phone blind timers

Best for: a game with no internet and no laptop.

There are dozens of these on both app stores, with the better ones offering custom structures, preset turbo and classic templates, and sound alerts at level changes. Ad-free versions are worth the small cost if you use one regularly.

Strengths: offline, instant, free. Limitations: a phone propped against a glass is not a display eight people can read. Price: free, usually with ads.

9. Settle-up apps

Best for: cash games, not tournaments.

General-purpose shared-expense apps such as Splitwise or Settle Up handle the “who owes whom” problem at the end of a cash night by netting everyone’s buy-ins against their cash-outs into the smallest number of payments.

Strengths: free, and everyone already has one. Limitations: no poker awareness at all. You are entering numbers by hand. Purpose-built alternatives are in home poker cash game trackers.

10. Free web calculators

Best for: the setup work you do before anyone arrives.

A blind structure calculator builds a level table for a target duration, a payout calculator turns a prize pool into a ladder, and a league points calculator shows how a scoring formula spreads points across a field. None of them run the night, but they answer the questions that otherwise get guessed at.

How to choose

• One-off game, no league: a free clock is genuinely all you need.

• Regular tournament, one table: a tournament manager saves you rebuilding the structure every time.

• Two or more tables: you want seating and balancing, which clocks do not do.

• A league or a season: standings and history are the whole point; do not run this on a clock.

• Cash games: a ledger, not a tournament tool.

Poker clock vs tournament management software draws the line between the first two categories in more detail.

Frequently asked questions

Your next step

If you have narrowed it to tournament software, the ten features that matter is the checklist to evaluate against, and the top five tournament management tools goes deeper on the main options.