I'm just curious about what other people's home game setup is like. Living room? Dining room? Game room? Basement? Other?

Personally, my game is setup either outside on the deck, or in the garage (if it rains). There are TVs viewable in both locations, plus radio/iPod tunes. I like to have some background noise during the game. The game is out of the house for several reasons:

1) Noise - on poker night the kids and wife can go to sleep even if all hell is breaking loose in the game, plus the guys know to just in/out the side gate so there's no traffic in the house

2) Smoke - I don't mind players smoking (just don't burn the felt!). I usually wait until I win or lose a big pot before firing up a cigar.

3) Cleanup - I can have my giant neighborhood trash and recycle bins right there for people to throw away bottles/cans etc.

Post a pic of your scene if you have one....(I'll try to dig one up and post too).

We have our games in a seperate room just for poker. It's a really basic set up, here's a pic:



The table is decent, gets the job done, it folds in the middle, but whatever. The chips are really great, we love them. Custom made from onlinepokerchips.com or something like that. Chairs are from our dining room set, so they're decent as well. We're working on decorating still :P

Why wait?

Taso - Nice. I _will_ have a dedicated room for poker someday (current house not big enough).

hime - Good point. I guess I'm in to delayed gratification.

OK, hopefully I figured out how to post a pic....

wow man. Nice table, nice looking deck, nice yard, and nice fence Seems like a really nice place you got there.

As for the Cigars, I like the idea of having a cigar as a celebration. When we do big tournaments back at my place in NY, I usually buy a cigar that day, just incase I win.

Thx. Its nice as long as the weather holds up (suburb north of Dallas). We've been rained on once...fire drill to collect chips and move to the garage was fun.

I know, my table is a poser table, but when I bought it I was new in town and wasn't sure if I could get a game going, so I bought the combo pool table/poker table so I could play pool on a miniature scale if I couldn't get a poker game going.

But hey... the chairs are awesome! Special thanks to Bertolini Sanctuatry Seating for making these great stackers for my rather small "congregation" (more of a prayer group actually).

Well thanks to Meetup.com, I have had 1-2 games per week for nearly two years now, and am kicking myself for not buying a normal poker table in the first place.

Damn, dude, I don't think I can beat your setup. That's nice. Mine's more the down 'n dirty sort of thing.

I rent in a house with a detached garage. When I moved in, it was full of junk. The previous owners had converted it to a studio/shop, so there were some partitions and a bathroom. I cleared out all the crap, removed the fluorescents, installed nicer overhead lights, put in some furniture, sound system, 6' movie screen, etc. I haven't done all that I've wanted to because the owners have plans to convert this place into an apartment, and I'm suffering from the limbo of "oh, we're going to start that next month, promise" ... for a year and a half now. Adjacent to the garage is a back patio area where we set up food. I have trash and recycling bins everywhere.

It looks rather low-rent (because it is), but it has a great atmosphere. No TV during games, as it's too distracting and not good for generating friendships. But plenty of good music, nice cards, different chips for cash (weekly) and tourney (monthly), and, most importantly, great people. These shots are from a tournament day; usually there are couches and chairs and the like, with only one of the tables (covered) set up permanently. Cash games we usually have 16-20 people, tournaments usually 20-30. I've customized the display of my TD software and created graphics for my evites to match. I keep people updated weekly and write silly little post-tourney trip reports.











As discussed in another thread, I'm tired of not being able to take this place and upgrade it how I want, so I'm investigating expanding the game a bit and having it fund itself more reliably than basing it on my winnings.

Zone has a really nice setup.

Would be appreciated if you all would give me input on dealing here. http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...=0#Post12208804

Zoneblitz, do you use your deck chairs when you play? It seems to me that the bases and/or the chairs themselves take up too much room.

TrvChBoy's chairs are nice, tho.

Pfapfap, for all the booze and beer that you buy, do you charge people per serving or let them drink at will?

The tourneys have a $15 house donation that covers the drinks and pizza. That usually breaks down to 3 beers, 1/3 of a pizza, and bottomless hooch. There's usually beer left over for the next cash game, too.

excellent choice with the Sierra Nevada.

We used to play on a friend's porch and that was pretty cool, until the cold weather comes. Yes, it gets cold in North Texas - sometimes under 30 degrees!

Some nice setups... had a couple of 2+2ers show up to my old game in Jason's garage and run off because it was "too dirty". Hey, I guess we do it different in Denton, yo. Eventually I'm gonna be in a house with a nice roomy 2 car garage and this'll come back, but it's not going to be quite the same.

My game is usually on the back patio with two homemade tables and custom Nexgens for chips. I get about 20 people and we play low stakes tourneys ($10 buy in). I will have to move everyone into the garage here soon. This weekend will be the last outdoor game I think.

Pfap, you have such a nice set up, why are you using dice chips? For about $200 you can get a chips and labels. The thing I have against dice chips is they make cheating very easy. Someone can bring a few extras if ya know what I mean. Sure, I'd like to think my crew wouldn't cheat at a $10 game, but I've seen cheaters in lower stakes.

"Our Scene" : http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...rt=all&vc=1

props to zoneblitz & pfapfap....sick lookin' setup

Cripes, don't talk to me about chips. I use the dice for the monthly tourneys, but lucky bee nexgen for cash.

I went through such a hassle when I got the lucky bees. Up until then I had just the dice for tourney and cash. Then I bought an assload of nexgens, but the color combinations just didn't work for me (I was too stupid to get a small sample). So I got more chips. It worked okay, but the color combinations between cash and tourney were similar, but not the same, so I thought it'd be confusing (either totally the same or totally different seemed better).... etc etc... so yeah, I ordered a lot of chips over a couple of week period.

Another issue is that there aren't really any cost effective chips that appeal to me visually. To get a full set for the tourneys, I'd need about 1200-1500 chips. If my house fee idea takes off and I open up the monthly tournaments to a larger crowd, then yeah, I'll be getting labels at the very least. So far we've never had a chip missing nor an extra at the end of the night.

looks sick zone....

I think you should use standard colors when using chips, so yes a red will count for 5 in a cash, or tourney setting. Keeping consistent helps the players know how much each chip is worth imho. FCI poker sells Nexgen 8000s for .13 each if you're looking for a cheap place. The good thing about them is you can order the quantities in the colors you want.

A-hahahahahahahaha! Standard colors? In the Bay Area? Let me go over the various dollar chips I know about from different rooms... lessee, light blue, green, purple... oh yeah, I think Lucky Chances might use white.

I did agonize long and hard about using standard colors, but I didn't like the "balance" of colors as it looked on the table while using chips below $1. It's a minor subtle thing, but it makes a difference. You want the chips to be nice to look at all piled up on the table. Compared to the saturation of the reds, blues, and greens, the whites seemed too "off" and weak-looking for the primary chip in play. I also like $20 chips, as I prefer my chips to relate to real world denomination values. Nobody carries $25 bills around.

Okay, so once my 'standard' color thing didn't look right, I tried to have one set of colors for cash (quarters, dollars, fives mostly) and tournament (twenties, hunnies, etc) with overlap on the same denominations. Again, couldn't get both to have combinations that worked without using the same color in drastically different spots. Because in tournies, there's also the consideration of how the colors look as chips get colored up and new colors are brought into play.

So even though the values are off by two orders of magnitude, I decided to use the first three chips as the same colors in both tourneys and cash, to eliminate any sort of confusion. In cash, that's $.25 yellow, $1 purple, $5 green. In tournament, that's T20 yellow, T100 purple, T500 green. There's been surprisingly little confusion regarding the 1/4 and 1/5 switch you get with yellows between the games.

Yeah, so, in the end I decided that since no rooms around here use anything close to standard, I went with chips that I like to look at when they're all piled and stacked up together. It's a subtle thing, but every now and again someone will comment on just how well the chips work together, and I know it was worth it. Colors affect people, and my cash game colors seem to affect them in good happy ways.

I told you not to talk to me about chips, gol-dangit. But this is the sort of thinking that goes into all my decisions here. PLEASE don't get me started on my blind schedule...

pfap - nice setup, again I hope to get a dedicated poker room eventually. I've been collecting sports memoribilia (my wife calls it junk) for my sports-bar-pool-poker-room I WILL have someday (oh yes, I will have it).

JJT - chairs not too big, I use 4 padded chairs from the patio set, then a set of metal/fabric stacking chairs for everything else (I get a padded chair).

I'm hoping I'll have a few more weeks outside...this Friday should be still be good at least.

I'll be setting up for my tourney this Friday. I'll see if I can snap a few picks to add.

pfap- I would gladly play with you so that I may consume your delightful selection of Fine Quality Beers.

Don't get me wrong Pfap, I like your set up. I'll try and post some pics I have of previous tournies. I am having one this weekend as well, so I'll try and dress up the place. We're about in garage weather here in the central valley (Ca). Then I'll have a real ugly set up.