Running a home poker game is supposed to be fun, but if you’re the one hosting, it often feels more like accounting. Tracking buy-ins, managing the clock, and figuring out the payouts at the end of the night can distract you from actually playing the game.
Felt: Poker Director is an app designed specifically to take care of that work.
What It Is
Felt: Poker Director is an iPhone and iPad app for running a home poker game.
It takes on the two jobs that usually fall to whoever owns the chips: keeping the clock and working out who owes what at the end.
The cards and chips stay on the table. Felt simply keeps track of what is happening around them.
What It Does
The blind timer is the core of the app. Pick a built-in structure, hit start, and Felt runs the levels and handles the breaks.
Pro subscribers can build their own structures, turn on spoken blind announcements, and put the clock on a TV through AirPlay or HDMI. On the TV, it becomes a full tournament board showing the blinds, countdown, payouts, chip denominations, seat draw, current seating and recent eliminations.
Felt also keeps track of the money side of the game.
When somebody buys in, rebuys, adds chips or cashes out, you enter it in the Felt: Poker Director under that player’s name. That way, you don’t have to remember everything at the end of the night or dig through notes while people are waiting to leave.
Once the game is finished, Felt works out who needs to pay whom. It tries to keep the number of payments as low as possible, so you might end up with three transfers instead of eight people sending money back and forth.
Tap a payment and Felt: Poker Director can open Venmo, PayPal or Cash App with the amount and note already entered. The player only needs to check it and send.
Tournaments can pay by percentage through Top-N payouts, by ICM, or by amounts you enter yourself. Bounties are supported too, along with an optional house fee for things like food and drinks.
For Pro subscribers, Felt can also handle multi-table events. It includes seat draws, table balancing, player-move screens on the TV and an alternates queue for people who arrive late.
Leagues can be used to track standings across a full season.
Pros
The TV Board
This is the standout feature.
Blinds, payouts, seating and knockouts are large enough to read from across the room, and there are several themes to choose from. It gives a normal home game much more of a tournament-room feel without needing extra equipment.
Excellent Settlement
Settlement is genuinely good.
Working out who owes what is one of the annoying parts of finishing a home game. Felt takes the numbers you already entered during the night and turns them into a short payment list.
Generous Free Tier
The free tier is a real product rather than a short demo.
You get the full timer, ledger and settlement system, plus support for both cash games and tournaments. There are no ads and no credit card is required.
Fast Setup
If you run the same game regularly, you do not have to set everything up again every week.
Save the structure once and it is there for the next game. Open the preset, add the players and start the clock.
Multi-Device Sync
You can use the same game on an iPhone and an iPad.
That is useful when more than one person helps run the night. If you are stuck in a hand, somebody else can enter a rebuy or deal with the game without taking your phone.
Cons
Apple Exclusive
Felt: Poker Director is iOS only.
There is no Android version and no web version, so it is not an option if the person running the game does not use Apple hardware.
Host-Centric
There is no separate player app.
Players cannot open Felt on their own phones to check their seat or stack. That information comes from the host or from the TV board.
TV Board Is Paywalled
The TV board requires Felt Pro.
That is unfortunate because it is one of the most interesting parts of the app, and there is no way to properly test it on the free plan.
Player Limits on Free
The free version is limited to nine players and one active game.
That is enough for a normal single-table home game. Once you start inviting more people or running more than one table, you will need Pro.
Pro Tier Player Cap
Even the Pro tier tops out at 90 players across 10 tables.
That should be more than enough for most home games, bar games and small leagues, but somebody running a very large charity event could eventually hit the limit.
No Payments Built In
Felt does not actually move the money.
It works out who should pay whom and can send you into a payment app with the details filled in, but the payment itself still happens through Venmo, PayPal, Cash App or another service.
Pricing
Free
The free version is permanent.
It includes one active game, up to nine players, the full blind timer, ledger and settlement system, cash games and tournaments, multi-device sync and one saved preset.
Felt Pro
Felt Pro costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year in the US and includes a 7-day free trial. Pricing can differ in other App Store regions.
Pro raises the limit to 90 players across 10 tables, allows up to 10 open games and supports two live tournaments alongside cash tables.
It also adds the TV board, ICM and Top-N payouts, bounties, custom blind structures, spoken blind announcements, the house fee, host-is-the-bank mode, leagues with season standings and CSV or PDF export.
Who It Is For
If you host a regular home game, use Apple devices and have a TV in the room, Felt makes a lot of sense.
Its biggest advantage is simple: you spend less of the night keeping score.
The clock keeps running, the TV answers most of the basic tournament questions and every buy-in or cash-out is already recorded when it is time to settle.
It can also work well for a smaller bar league or charity tournament, as long as the event stays under the 90-player limit.
The house-fee option can keep track of money collected for food or other costs, while host-is-the-bank mode is useful when one person wants to hold the money and pay players directly as they leave. That can be much cleaner than asking a room full of people who barely know each other to settle between themselves.
Felt: Poker Director Verdict
Felt is a much better fit for some home games than others.
If your group uses a mix of Android and Apple devices and you want every player to see their own information on their phone, this is probably not the app for you.
But if one person normally runs the game from an iPhone or iPad, Felt removes a surprising amount of work from the night.
The timer is good, the settlement system is practical, and the TV board is the feature that really changes how the game feels.
For an Apple-based home game, Felt: Poker Director app is one of the strongest poker director apps available.
For those who wish to move their home game online, check out the best club-based poker apps candidates to do that.
