Managing Your PokerStars Home Games Poker Club

The great thing about PokerStars Home Games is the number of ways in which you can customize your poker club. You can play any type of poker you can imagine, all in any game structure you'd ever want. Your options are endless.

There are two basic game structures you can set up in your Home Games club: cash games and tournaments. A cash game is an ongoing game of poker with no defined start or end; the game has revolving blinds and stays running as long as there are players sitting down. A tournament is a structured, scheduled, and more rigid game; each player starts with a certain amount of chips, and plays with the same stack throughout the game until he busts.

Both cash games and tournaments are lots of fun, and you'll probably want to spread both at some point in your Home Games club's lifespan. So let's see how we can set up either type of game from our club's poker lobby.

Managing and Setting a Home Games Cash Game

Sometimes you just feel like playing a fast-paced and relatively unstructured game. Home Games cash games fit the bill nicely.

To create a cash game table, you'll first want to click over to your poker club's main lobby. You'll see a row of buttons at the top of the window. Click "Manage Games" on the right-hand side. This will pull up, unsurprisingly, the game management window.

You'll see a button on the right-hand side of the window labelled "Create a Table..." Click it to pull up the Home Games cash game menu. From here, you can set up a custom cash game using parameters you specify. Some of your options will be:

• Game Type: Choose from Holdem, Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, Stud, Stud Hi-Lo, Razz, 5-Card Draw, Single Draw 2-7, Triple Draw 2-7, HOSE, HORSE, Mixed, Mixed Omaha Hi-Lo, PLH/PLO, 8-Game Mix, Triple Stud, and Badugi.
• Betting Structure: No Limit, Limit, and Pot Limit.
• Players Per Table: 9, 8, 6, and 2.
• Currency: US Dollar, Euro, and Play Money.

Obviously, you've got tons of choices. Once you've selected your parameters, your Home Games cash game table will be ready to go. Just let your club's members know about the game, sit in, and you're ready to play.

Managing a Home Games Tournament

A Home Games tournament is a great way to ante up the competition within your poker club. There's nothing better than beating out an entire field of your friends for first place. Whether you're in it for the money or the bragging rights, here's how to set up a Home Games tournament for your poker club.

Navigate to the "Manage Games" window just as you did when setting up a cash game. You'll see a button labelled "Create a Tournament..." located at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Click it to access the tournament menu.

The tournament menu gives you lots of options. You can choose your preferred currency, your desired buy-in level, and the game format you'd like to play. You can set custom starting stack levels, and decide how many players will get paid. You can even set a custom time interval for blind levels.

These are all great features, but the coolest thing about Home Games tournaments, in my opinion, is that you can schedule them in advance. This makes it easy to schedule a bi-weekly, weekly, or monthly game. Simply select the date on which you want the tournament to occur, fill in the required information, and forget about it--all you need to do is show up on the specified date, ready to play!

Any tournament you create can be set to count towards your club's leaderboard. A leaderboard is just a scorekeeping system for your the club; it keeps track of each player's losses and wins using a points system. If you want your tournament to count towards the leaderboard, make sure you check the box at the bottom of the tournament setup dialog box.

Once you've set all the tournament options exactly how you want them, click "Create Tournament." Voila! You're done. The tournament will be listed in the club's lobby under "Manage Tournaments." If you or a club member wants to play in the tournament, you just need to double click the tournament listing and click "Register."

Managing your Home Games poker club is really that easy!