Just a word of warning. There's a double edged sword to allowing your home game to grow beyong a few friends. Sure the pot get fatter, but you don't always know the people sitting at the tables. The game I play in on a regular basis ran into a couple of counterfeiters trying to pass off fake $20's. So be careful out there!

Yikes! Thanks for the cautionary tale.

This is a very good point. My game is not open to anybody, and I do not advertise online. My players are instructed to ask me first before inviting anybody, and I do a little mini-interview to figure out how well they know each other. If you invite someone, you are vouching for that person.

It's worked out very well. A side benefit to having people you like invite more people that they like, is that the overall crowd tends to get along pretty well.

How did you catch the fake $20s and what did they look like?

What did you do regarding the bank?

What did you do regarding these two guys?

Also, how did they get invited? Friend of a friend? Internet or other type of promo? Open door policy?

www.PokerMatchMaker.com
?

a bad bill is easy to spot just by how it feels or the shifting ink or the watermark. if your really concerned get yourself a black light.

or u could do this: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/951311/detect_fake_money/

take precautions if your the host and take a bat to the offenders .

"shifting" ink?

Easy? Yeah, I'll hold up my game's buyins by folding bills and playing with magnets :P

move to a country with better cash, imo.

He's talking about the color-shifting ink on US bills. It changes color depending on the viewing angle.

There's really one main thing I want to know. Where did you get the money you plan to gamble with? Once you understand that, you can pretty accurately predict his trustworthiness, behavior, and results.

If it's his whole paycheck, or from crime, sorry buddy you can't come.

The magnet is just a neat trick (especially at 4am with no sleep). If u look at the twenty directly into a light source u can see the metal strip. True of all us bills down to 5 at least. In the bottom us 20 the ink color shifts from green to black depending on the angle. If it dosent change color its fake.

I like this filtering idea. Thanks.

I could not have said it better myself. If someone asks me if they can bring a guest, I specifically tell them that they are vouching for the new guy, and their own invite to the game is at stake. I have had several people that are no longer on my list.

Ummmm.... who would answer these questions for you, and you'd know they were being honest? I thought MY interview process was an anal probe from hell.... I've GOT to see yours!

Wait, so they were good players with bad judgment (what did their guests do, exactly?) and you dumped them?

Or, did their true colors come out when they tried to team-play your game, and your screening didn't pick up original player's character?

Yes...nice people...bad judgement. Just overall being not a good person to have in your home, whether it's not following simple requests, like not putting your drink on certain furniture, or not being respectful to other family members in my house.

So, it had nothing to do with the guests that these players brought in?

Or, the guests were doing those things (toss 'em!) and you tossed the regs as well, for their bad judgment in picking guests?

Seems a bit harsh, if the latter... without knowing exactly what was done, by whom. But, it's your game

My apologies for not being clear. Yes...the new guests were no good.

My game has been running pretty consistently for almost 5 years now (except for Jan-Apr tax season months) and I have grown & shrunk my list over time. I am very careful who comes.

Yes, it may be harsh, to stop inviting a regular for bringing a bad guest, but again, it's in my house.

Somehow a registered sex offender became reg in our home game. Eventually he stopped coming after losing large sums of money.

We play pretty big at our homegame, so I invested in a counterfiet bill pen. I mark every bill at the start of the evening. I also have marked every single one of my chips with a blacklight readable pen. Every once in a while I do a spot check on my chips just to make sure no one is bringing in the same chips (Custom chips are key)

I, of course, use custom chips, but I haven't taken to marking them in UV yet. My cash set probably played it's biggest game yesterday, and there was only, oh... ...1500? on the table. It could have easily gotten to 2k, but a few players who were supposed to be there didn't show.

I digress.

Some good UV flashlights can be had for very cheap at DX.
http://www.dealextreme.com/products.dx/category.912

The 1W and 3W UltraFires are quite nice.

The UV marking seems fancy, but how does it prevent anything? And once people know you do it, what's to stop them from replicating that as well? I'd think custom chips are enough for any big stakes game. Hell, I have chips that anybody can get from online, and we've had a few grand in the room. Never had a problem. But if I opened up the game and raised the stakes, custom chips would be a requirement.

Security in layers.

Now, not only does someone have to discover that we use UV ink on the chips, but they have to duplicate that too.

Okay, so it's not something you scan at cashout or anything?

So let's say you find counterfeits. Then what?

What does this do that keeping a known quantity in racks does not? If they get it to the point of being visually accepted in play, has not the damage been done?

It gives you options. Even if you're not active in scanning them - and letting people know that they exist; It lets you find the fakes. Now you at least know when the came in, what rack they ended up in, what game they came from - perhaps.

If you're actively scanning for them, then it's simply something extra that someone has to do to defeat your security.

And, the primary reason to use a UV device is to check your cash quickly - not your chips.

...that said, if my game got big enough, I'd probably mark large denomination chips -- just to provide that extra layer of security. Do I think it's foolproof? By no means. But it's cheap and effective to implement. There are dozens of places to buy permanent ink UV marking ink and get a custom stamper made.

I've posted this one before:
http://www.maxmax.com/aUVBlueInvisibleInks.htm

So, for maybe $20 and a custom stamp I can buy at any office store in town, now I've got another layer of security in my game. Can you defeat it for $20 too? Perhaps. ...but it's just one more thing you'd have to bypass to crack my game.

I'm all for added layers of security, I just don't know what this does. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm legitimately confused.

So you know that someone brought in extra chips. You know that anyway because the bank is off and the chip count is too high. Now you scan them to see that some were, indeed, brought in. Um, okay. Didn't we already know that?

See what I'm saying? Don't try to sell me on it, explain it to me, please. "Added layer of security" doesn't make sense, because I don't understand what it's securing, or how it's doing it.