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Cash Game How I Bank at a Home Game in an Increasingly Cashless Society (4 Viewers)
- Thread starter ArielVer18
- Start date
How does it handle a situation where some players buy in for cash, and some will pay with Venmo etc.?
When you say your version... Do you have an iOS app that does this? I seem to be missing something
Poker Zombie
Royal Flush
RIP Steve
Thanks for the callout!
That must be an iPad? I gotta look into that menu/header for that screen size.
Yes, that’s my iPad. A menu stack at the top would be nice.
I just cut off the timed entry log on my screen shot just to keep the picture a bit smaller. It’s present in my iPad, too, just as you have it. Gives a nice linear entry trail clocked by time if anyone challenges what’s been entered.
I do like the modifiable add on amounts to quickly bump up the numbers. I would change mine to $1 and $10 when using it so I can more easily make any combinations of top offs, add ons, etc.
Youse guys should go to the site and play with it a bit (and check out the log entries).
LotsOfChips
Flush
...which works until it doesn't.
For that situation the app won’t be able to tell what buy is Venmo or cash. Since everything is squared up at the end on credit they would can use whatever means to pay.
The players who bought in for cash have already paid; the ones using virtual credit have not.
Poker Zombie
Royal Flush
This also works best if everybody uses the same apps. I got one idiot that only uses Apple Pay.
dkersey
Straight
If I'm bringing cash and the process is to settle after via apps, I'm not handing any cash over until after, like everyone else.
Poker Zombie
Royal Flush
Using the app, I would not suggest otherwise - however, if you are bringing cash to a Venmo-centric group, I would think it would be on the cash player(s) to carry exact change. A ridiculous number of people under 30 don't have cash.
Mr Winberg
Full House
What is a cash?
I see. The ones with cash wouldn’t be “paying” to buy in since the app works on credit. For example, if Johnny cash wanted to buy in to the game, the cashier would log in his buy in but not take his money. The same would be for Vince Venmo. When the game is over, the app tells who to pay and how much. The players would square up after the fact so no money changes hands until the game ends. The cashier could accept cash up front but then they would have to be the one to payout everyone and the app doesn’t differentiate that. The flaw here is that you need someone to keep track of the buyins AND you have to trust everyone will pay up. I hope that makes sense.
OP
OP
ArielVer18
Flush
At the end of the game, I fill out an Excel spreadsheet on my laptop and Chromecast to a nearby TV for all players to follow along. What's the advantage to an app or website over my "old-fashion" method?
Poker Zombie
Royal Flush
It's automated, so nobody has to figure out who owes who how much and it's instant. If you have everyone pay the bank then the bank pays everyone out, that also works, but it could run afoul of taxable transaction limits (only Paypal currently) or it could look like gambling (prohibited by PayPal, Venmo, and possibly others).
ballefrans
Two Pair
Thanks! This looks good
Tarsus4
High Hand
I enjoyed reading through this thread. One thing I'd like to learn more about, what do people do who handle larger amounts of money? Both cash and cashless are easy for me in my dinky .25/.50 game, but if I started to have more than, say, $5k in cash in my home, that lots of people know about and could tip others off about... I would start to get a little twitchy about it. The risk of getting stiffed by someone I know for $1k starts to look preferable to being robbed by someone I may or may not know for ten times that.
But conversely cashless at these stakes there's more bank scrutiny and potentially IRS reporting. Does anyone have experiences they'd like to share about handling this level of money? (I hope to never have to deal with these problems personally, just curious)
But conversely cashless at these stakes there's more bank scrutiny and potentially IRS reporting. Does anyone have experiences they'd like to share about handling this level of money? (I hope to never have to deal with these problems personally, just curious)
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None of this makes any sense. Poker is traditionally a cash based game. And I'm one of these people who rarely carries cash for anything other than poker, and pays for everything I can with credit cards. If a host wants to allow electronic payments, I suppose something like this is useful. But I would personally not join a group that expected primarily electronic payments, unless host agreed to accept cash from me, and pay me any winnings with cash, even if I were a big winner and stacked the majority of the room. I have no use for carrying balances on electronic payment apps, and no interest in there being an electronic trail for my poker wins.
C'mon people. How hard is it to stop at the ATM and get cash in the days or hours before a poker game?
All your cash players stay until the very end of the game?
This.
I disinvited one player who repeatedly ignored reminders that my game was cash only. He would either show up with no cash at all; or bring a minimum buy-in, bust, and then ask to use Venmo for a full buy-in. If I said no, then he would badger other players to front him cash which he'd pay for later with Venmo. While he did make his payments, this unwillingness to respect the game was a deal-breaker (along with some other bad behavior which made it that much easier to part ways with him).
I also am amazed by people who play 1-3 times per week at various games, but don't maintain a totally separate poker bankroll. If you are a long-term winning player, you should seldom if ever have to go to get out cash before a game.... But if you are a long-term losing player, you should accept that, and (if you want to keep playing poker) go to the bank periodically to get cash, which stays separate from your other spending money.
I occasionally encounter players who literally make multiple convenience store ATM withdrawals before a game ($200 being the usual maximum per withdrawal) racking up fees of $3-$5 per transaction. More bad bankroll management—essentially the ATM is an extra rake.
My game is well above micro stakes, so there is a fair amount of money in the box.
I don't worry about it for a variety of reasons, some but not all of which are somewhat unique to my game:
(1) I live at the end of a long dead-end dirt road, surrounded by dense woods. The location feels pretty forbidding at night. It's dark, and not uncommon to hear coyotes howling. It's pretty much impossible to approach the game location (in an outbuilding) without being noticed, not least by my large dog with uncanny hearing.
(2) I have multiple cameras which record instantly to the cloud, and alert me about any sounds/movement, both outside and in my poker room. The people who play in my game know this. So even if someone wanted to (say) tip off a third party to rob the game, any vehicle and persons who manage to find the location are going to be caught on tape.
(3) I have several regs who, shall we say, can handle themselves.
(4) Nobody gets invited who isn't well-known to me and/or my regs.
(5) Maybe most usefully, the "community" of people in my area with any connection at all to poker is very small. It's rare that I meet someone who plays seriously whom I haven't encountered before, or who wouldn't be known to others in my game, including my dealer who also runs a game of his own. So if there were a problem, it would be pretty easy to track down the likely sources of it.
That is not to say that something can't happen. The problem with most criminals is that they are not necessarily rational.
So strong deterrents don't always work like "You're going to have to first find this obscure place in the woods at night; then figure out how to get past multiple cameras undetected; approach the place without any person or dogs noticing as you try to sneak up; not get wrestled to the floor by a 6-foot-6 guy who may or may not be carrying; get away clean with the cash; and not have anyone either hear about or just immediately figure out who did it; and deal with the consequences."
Quite honestly it would be a lot easier to just rob a busy store.
Mr Winberg
Full House
While chips for cash and cash for chips is the simplest, the most accommodating is simply: Update the player's debt and then pay with what you like on cashout. Cash? IOY? Botcoin? Venmo? Closure on a previous debt? That baseball card I always wanted? The bounty chips you scored in the tourney? Doesn't matter! As long as I as the host am happy with the form of payment I will scratch the player's legder on cash out.
Once again, not as clean as cash-for-chips, but then again much more accommodating and not nearly as complicated as some seem to think.
Once again, not as clean as cash-for-chips, but then again much more accommodating and not nearly as complicated as some seem to think.
Bring back the 500E bill (still accepted but not printed anymore).
Worth $580
Worth $580
I think another way this could work for mixed cash and virtual buyins is to create (A) Cash player entries with $0 in buyins, plus (B) a dummy player called TheBox who has $0 in winnings.
TheBox's buyin number would be a running total of actual dollars put in by all the cash players combined.
Then what is owed could be run as usual.
One complication is that cash players typically also want to be paid out in cash, at least as much as possible.
I can definitely see that working to the keep things separate.
Unfortunately you cannot have your cake and eat it. I used to run a game that usually has about $4000+ on the table by the end of the night. When the money gets that big there is always a security risk of someone finding out and coming to rob the place. If you don't want a paper trail then you have to be comfortable having that amount of money in cash. If you don't want to have large amounts of cash at your house, you have to have a paper trail of some sort if the payments are electronic. It's kind of a pick your poison and eat it situation. I wasn't comfortable having huge amount of cash so we just venmo/zelle each other at the end of the game.
Tarsus4
High Hand
Yeah, the theory I'm landing on is that at certain stakes the balance of risks tips away from handling cash. The risk of carrying cash goes up (a lot) and the risk of someone being unable or unwilling to repay a gambling debt in a social setting goes down (slightly). So that leaves the logistics of cashless as the last barrier, which means trust and allowing some debts (or balances) to make transactions less frequent.
LotsOfChips
Flush
How TF does the risk of someone welching go down at higher stakes?
Tarsus4
High Hand
Conjecture just based on the people I know (and myself): first as a person's ability to fund higher stakes increases, it's likely that they'll have more ways to deal with a debt (more regular wage income, other income streams, assets). Second, a person playing for higher stakes will IMO place higher value on the opportunity to gamble and socially network over the money itself (more value on things that money won't buy).
I do think the effect is small, but in that direction. And of course regardless of financial starting situation, it's always possible to get yourself into trouble you can't get out of.
LotsOfChips
Flush
Another word for wishful thinking.
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