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What happens to your chips when something goes wrong

4 September 2026 · 7 min read

Someone's wifi dies holding the second-best hand. Someone rage-quits mid-pot. The server restarts while four of you are all-in. In a home game with physical chips these are social problems — you look at the table and work it out. Online, they're accounting problems, and somebody's stack is the answer. Here is exactly what pokr does in each case, and how we check that it did it right.

Why this is the only question that matters

In pokr, a club manager issues the chips. There is no deposit, no cash-out, no real money anywhere — chips are internal to your club and worth nothing outside it. That removes a whole category of worry, but it puts all the remaining weight on one thing: the count has to be right. If chips can quietly appear or vanish, the manager's ledger stops meaning anything, and "I had 4,200 before my phone died" becomes an argument nobody can settle.

So the design goal isn't "nothing ever goes wrong." Things go wrong — phones lose signal, browsers get closed, servers get deployed. The goal is that every chip is somewhere, and the total never changes.

Your connection drops mid-hand

Your seat is held for two minutes. Not your turn — your seat, with your stack on it. During that window you're folded out of the current hand so the table can keep playing without waiting on you, but nothing is returned and nobody can take your chair. Reopen the table inside two minutes and you sit back down exactly where you were.

If two minutes pass, your remaining stack goes back to your club balance and the seat opens up. You didn't lose the chips; they're in your balance, and you can buy back in whenever you want.

You click Leave in the middle of a pot

You don't vanish from the felt instantly, and that's deliberate. You're folded, your bets stay in the pot — chips you have already put in belong to the hand, not to you — and your seat clears once the hand finishes. Whatever is left of your stack goes back to your club balance.

The alternative would be to yank you out immediately, which sounds tidier and is much worse: the hand you were in would have to be unwound, and every other player's action in it re-evaluated. Poker doesn't have an undo button. So the hand finishes, and you leave when it does.

Sit & Go plays by different rules, on purpose

In a cash game your stack is yours and you can take it off the table. In a tournament it isn't — it's equity in a prize pool that everyone bought into, and taking it out would mean the remaining players are competing for a pool that shrank after they committed to it.

So in a running Sit & Go, leaving does not return chips. If you go offline and stay offline, your seat keeps posting blinds until it busts, and you finish in whatever place that lands you.

Three people go all-in for different amounts

You have 400, someone has 1,200, someone has 3,000, and all three of you are in. There isn't one pot — there are three, and you can only win the part you actually covered. Your 400 matches 400 from each of the others, so the main pot is 1,200 and you're eligible for it. The next 800 from the two deeper stacks makes a side pot you can't win. The rest is between the two of them.

This is standard poker and every serious tool gets it right, but it's worth stating because it's the most common place a home-game app quietly cheats: it's much easier to write "biggest hand takes everything," and it's wrong, and the person it robs is always the short stack who just doubled through.

The part you don't see: every session is reconciled

Any stretch of play with at least two people at a table is recorded as a session: who sat, with what buy-in, every hand, every action, who left with how much. When the session ends, the chips are added up.

Everything that came in — the stacks people sat down with, plus every rebuy — has to equal everything that went out: the stacks people left with, plus the stacks still on the table at the end. Not approximately. The check is exact, and a session that fails it is flagged for the club's staff to look at.

This exists because it's the only way to know. Poker software has a lot of moving parts, and "it looked fine" is not evidence. A per-session count either balances or it doesn't.

The server restarts while you're playing

Deploys happen, and occasionally something crashes. Your stack lives in the server's memory while a table is live, so this is the case with the most obvious way to lose chips.

On the way down, every live table is settled: any hand in progress is voided and each player's committed chips go back to the player who bet them, then every stack on every seat is returned to its owner's club balance and the open sessions are closed and reconciled. When the server comes back the tables are empty and everyone's chips are in their balance, ready to sit down again.

You lose the hand you were in. You don't lose anything else.

We went and checked, instead of assuming

Writing the rules down is the easy half. In August we read a full month of production logs and every recorded session against those rules, line by line, and then reproduced what we found on a local copy. A few things weren't behaving the way this page describes:

• Clicking Leave repeatedly during a live hand paid the stack out more than once. Because the seat is deliberately held until the hand ends, a second click found it still there and returned the chips again. Reproduced exactly: five clicks, five payouts, one buy-in.
• A tournament could award first place twice when somebody was disconnected at the moment it started, paying the top prize to two people out of a pool that only contained one.
• Two people opening the same table at the same instant could crash the server — which, back then, also destroyed every stack on every table.
• Several people sitting down within the same second could start a hand on top of another one, burning the blinds the overwritten hand had already posted.

All of those are fixed, each with a before-and-after measurement rather than a hopeful commit message. The restart behaviour described above is new too — before this month, a deploy really did take the chips on live tables with it.

What still isn't perfect

The session reconciliation checks what happened at the table. It's very good at spotting chips that went missing between sitting down and standing up, and it is not, by itself, a complete audit of every club balance. Widening it is the next piece of work.

And the honest general answer: this is a small tool built by one person for a regular home game. What it has going for it isn't that it's never wrong — it's that it writes down enough to find out when it is.

What this means for your Friday

Mostly, nothing. Play the game, and when someone's connection dies you'll know what happened to their stack without anyone having to adjudicate it. Which is the whole point: the chips should be the least interesting thing at the table.