Felt is a tournament manager for pubs, clubs, card rooms and kitchen tables. Blind structures, seat draws, table balancing, payouts, leagues, seasons — the admin, done. And it keeps working when the venue Wi‑Fi doesn’t.
Free forever for home games. Floor staff join by QR, no accounts. Spectators just scan the screen.
The clock was never the hard part: a dozen free clocks exist. The hard part is everything around it, every single week. Felt does that part.
| The job | Tonight, without Felt | With Felt |
|---|---|---|
| Registration | A Facebook thread, and eight names of people who aren’t coming. | Roster import and self-registration. Players claim their own history later, and no result is ever rewritten. |
| Seat draw | Torn-up beer mats in a pint glass. | A seeded draw: provably fair, repeatable, one tap. |
| Table balancing | Whoever complains loudest gets moved. | TDA Rule 11 balancing, suggested automatically. Accept or override. |
| Payouts | Biro maths at 11pm while the final table waits. | Payout schemes with rounding rules, and deals priced with exact ICM to 15 players. |
| Standings | A spreadsheet somebody updates on Thursday. Usually. | Season standings scored the moment results publish, embeddable on your own site. |
Felt’s clock is a pure function of time, not a ticking process. It doesn’t need the server, and it can’t fall behind: the sheet on the right is running in your browser right now, and so is the chip above. Turn off your Wi-Fi. Nothing happens.
That’s the whole product in one trick. The tournament is an append-only event log; the device in the room holds the authority; the cloud is a replica. The clock just reads the time.
| LEVEL | SB | BB | ANTE | MIN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 25 | 50 | — | 15 |
| 2 | 50 | 100 | — | 15 |
| 3 | 75 | 150 | — | 15 |
| 4 | 100 | 200 | — | 15 |
| BREAK | colour-up 25s | 10 | ||
| 5 | 150 | 300 | 300 | 15 |
| 6 | 200 | 400 | 400 | 15 |
| 7 | 300 | 600 | 600 | 15 |
| 8 | 400 | 800 | 800 | 15 |
Every venue’s network fails eventually: mid-event, on a Friday, during the final table. It is the one failure mode no competitor will talk about. We built the whole product around it.
A demonstration screen: the entries are invented, but the clock is real, and it is running in your browser right now.
Every action — a bust-out, a re-entry, a deal — is an event in an append-only, hash-chained log. Nothing is ever overwritten, so nothing is ever lost, and every payout can be audited back to the hand it came from.
The device in the venue is the authority; the cloud is a replica. When the connection drops, nothing stops. The iPad will run a five-hour tournament with no network at all, then reconcile when the world comes back.
Felt’s clock is a pure function of time, not a ticking process. It doesn’t need the server, and it can’t fall behind: the chip at the top of this page is the same clock, doing the same thing.
The difference between a kitchen table and a thousand-runner Day 1C is configuration, not code. Same event log, same engine, same API — a bigger chip.
Home games run free forever, and they run on the same integrity invariants a casino audits against. That’s not generosity; it’s the same code path.
An iPad on the HDMI cable. A laptop behind the bar. The floor staff’s own phones. Nobody installs anything, and nobody makes an account they’ll forget.
The tournament director’s console, with the Cinema view on the big screen over HDMI. Holds the room’s authority, and runs the whole night with no internet at all.
OFFLINE-FIRSTDirector, Cinema and Floor in a browser tab: full-screen clock with wake lock, floor control, the lot. A venue with a laptop and an HDMI cable is a customer today.
NO INSTALLClock control, one-tap bust-outs, re-entries, seat draws and announcements from the floor. Staff join by scanning a QR on the big screen: no account, no invite, revocable in one tap.
QR ACCESSPlayers and railbirds scan the screen and get the live board on their own phone: structure, stacks, payouts, standings. Free forever, and every Cinema screen in every pub is your league’s front page.
FREE FOREVERBrand, region, venue, season, event, entry, player — with roles at every level. A scoring rule set at the brand pushes down to every venue. A venue manager signs in and sees exactly their room, and nothing else.
Built for the operator with a thousand venues as much as the landlord with one: imports run as durable jobs with a dry-run diff at 82,000 players, dual-running alongside your current system is supported deliberately, and your data exports in full, always.
Public from day one — not a private API we’ll document later. 83 paths, 122 operations, a published OpenAPI spec, and generated TypeScript and Swift clients we use to build our own apps, which is the only reliable way to keep a public spec honest.
Breaking changes only at /v2, with twelve months’ notice and
Sunset headers. A card room can drive Felt from its own floor
system; a room with its own screens can embed our Cinema boards.
# the full projection of a live tournament (abridged) $ curl https://api.feltpoker.uk/v1/tournaments/trn_82c41 \ -H "Authorization: Bearer felt_live_k3…" { "level": 5, "blinds": { "sb": 150, "bb": 300, "ante": 300 }, "entries": 41, "remaining": 17, "prize_pool": { "total": 82000, "currency": "GBP" }, "integrity": { "chips_conserved": true } }
Felt is software with a subscription. We never take a cut of prize pools or entry fees, we never touch player money, and your data exports in full whenever you ask. Leaving must be free — or staying means nothing.