By Rafael CardosoJuly 30, 20269 min readThe Table Module: A Screen for the Person Actually Sitting at the Table
Two tables running. You are at table one. Someone busts at table two, and now the whole room waits while a player shouts across the room, you find the right name in a list of thirty-four, and you click the right button. Multiply by every bust-out of the night.
The bottleneck is not the software. It is that all the software lives on one laptop, and the laptop is not where the poker is happening.
The table module fixes that by giving every table its own screen, its own web address, and its own set of permissions. Open it on a spare laptop, a tablet propped against the chip rack, or the phone of whoever is dealing. The person who can see the table is the person who records what happened at it.
What the table screen is
It is a full-screen view of one table, and nothing else. An oval felt, the seats around it, the current level in the middle, and the names of the people sitting there.
Tap a seat and you get the actions that seat allows.
"Set Seat 1 here" is the detail people notice
A poker table has no top. The dealer sees seat 4 in front of them; the screen insists seat 1 is at twelve o'clock. That mismatch produces a small mental rotation on every single interaction, and small mental rotations at 1am produce mistakes.
Tap any position and tell the app that is where seat 1 sits. The whole layout rotates to match what the operator is looking at, and it is remembered for that table on that device. Two people running two tables can have completely different orientations, both correct.
The shot clock
Two buttons, 20 and 30 seconds. Press one and the countdown takes over the entire screen at a size the far end of the table can read. Tap to dismiss. It is not tied to any hand-history system and it does not need to be — it exists so "call the clock" stops being an argument about how long a minute is.
Handing out access without handing over the tournament
The reason a host ends up doing everything is usually not workload, it is trust. Giving someone the ability to eliminate a player has historically meant giving them the ability to change the blind structure.
Table admins are scoped to one table, with seven permissions you switch on individually.
The practical setup for a two-table home game: give each dealer eliminate, move, swap, rebuy and add-on. Leave edit and timer control off. They can keep their table moving all night and cannot accidentally advance a blind level for the whole tournament.
It stays in sync with everything else
The table screen is not a detached remote control. It reads and writes the same seating data as the host's tournament view, live. An elimination recorded at table two appears on the main seating map and the tournament screen without anyone refreshing anything.
That matters most for the thing tables are actually hard at: keeping them even.
The balancer proposes moves; it never just does them. You see who is going where, untick anything you disagree with, and apply the rest. It refuses to move a player who was moved in the last ten minutes, and it will tell you that is why a table stayed uneven rather than silently doing nothing.
The rest of the table toolkit
Lock a table
Locked tables are left alone by automatic rebalancing. Useful for the table with the bad knee that should not be moved.
Lock or reserve a seat
Reserve for a specific late registrant, or lock a seat out entirely — dealer, staff, or a wobbly chair — with a reason attached.
Break a table
One action moves every seated player onto the remaining tables and closes it. It tells you exactly how many moved.
Final table
Promote an existing table or create a fresh one, and the app reseats everyone still alive and closes the rest.
Redraw all
Unseat everybody and randomly reassign. Locks and reservations are honoured; player reservations are optionally cleared.
Force seat
An admin override for reserved or locked seats when reality disagrees with the plan. It is logged as an override.
Getting to it
The table screen is not hidden behind anything, but it is easy to miss because it lives one level down from where you normally work.
Open the tournament and go to Seating.
Every table has a header row with its own actions: Open table loads the screen here, Open in new window puts it on a second display, and Copy table URL gives you the link.
Send that link to whoever is running the table. It opens straight to that table on their device.
Manage Admin in the same header is where you give them permission to do anything once they are there.
The link is stable for the life of the tournament, so a dealer can bookmark it or keep the tab open all night.
How to actually use it on the night
- From Seating, copy each table URL and open it on the screen nearest that table
- Rotate each one so seat 1 matches the real dealer position
- Add the dealer as a table admin with eliminate, move, swap, rebuy and add-on
- Keep the seating page on your own screen and watch the imbalance banner
Nothing about that is complicated. It just moves the work to where the information already is, which is the whole point. The host stops being a bottleneck and goes back to being a host.
Give every table its own screen
Set up your tables, hand out scoped access, and let the people at the table record what happens at the table.
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