Poker Minder Help

Choosing a Tournament

When you launch Poker Minder, you will see the tournament selection screen. The first tournament: "My Tournament", is fully configurable so you can customise it to your preference. The changes you make will be automatically saved so they are available the next time you launch Poker Minder.

The other pre-defined tournaments are popular home poker tournament formats which are pre-configured for your convenience. It's not possible to edit these tournaments, but if you like the format you can configure "My Tournament" with the same settings.

Editing My Tournament

While viewing My Tournament in the tournament selection menu, press 'Edit' (Left selection button).
Editing will become enabled. Scroll up and down to navigate to each setting that can be changed. Press Left and Right to change the settings. At any time you can press '0' to edit the blind structure for the current selected blind structure.

Press 'Save' (Left selection button) to save your changes. The settings will be saved in memory and available the next time you launch Poker Minder.

If you don't want to save your changes, press 'Cancel' to return to the tournament navigation screen.

Editing Blind Structures

While editing My Tournament, press '0'. This will launch the blind structure editing window. Navigate to each blind level by pressing up and down and press left or right to decrease or increase the blind amount, which increments in values of 25.

If you have made changes but do not want to save them, you can press "Undo" (Right selection button) to revert back to the original settings and start again.

Chip Distribution

After selecting a tournament format, the next screen is a guide on how to distribute the starting chips amongst each player; the totals shown are what each player should receive.

The chip distribution is based on a standard 5 colour chip set which seems to be a very popular chip set.

If you only have a 3 colour chip set, or perhaps even only 1 colour, you need to change the denominations as the blinds increase, otherwise you will run out of chips if the tournament is a re-buy or add-on. Further to that, the pots will become unmanageable as the number of chips involved increase as the levels increase.

Assign Dealer

In casino poker tournaments, seats are assigned to each player and the dealer is provided by the casino. At home, the luxury of having a dealer is rare! Each player will take it in turn to deal the round, moving around the table clockwise.

Being the Dealer is the most valuable position in the hand, so it's only fair to randomly choose a dealer to start the tournament. There are several ways to do it, but for convenience Poker Minder includes a random Dealer Assigner.

If you prefer to draw cards to assign a dealer you can press "Skip" (Left selection button) to proceed to the tournament screen. To use Poker Minder to assign a dealer, place the phone in the centre of the table and press "Assign" (Select). This will start the selection arrow rotating. After a few seconds it will stop spinning; the person sat closest to the position the arrow points will start as the dealer.

Tournament Screen

The next screen is the tournament screen. Once you are ready to start, press "5" and then start to deal the first hand.

Please note: The "5" keypad button is used to start/stop the timer instead of "Select", which is what you might expect. This is because once the phone is left for a while the backlight turns off. The most common button to press to reactivate it is "Select". If "Select" is pressed it will control the timer and at the end of a level start the next one, when all you wanted to do is switch the backlight on so you can see Poker Minder.

When the level time is 1 minute from the end, a ticking sound will be triggered as a pre-emptive alert to indicate the level is nearly over.

Once the timer has finished, a ringing sound will declare the end of the round. The blinds will increase and the timer waits for you to start the next level.

If the tournament is a re-buy or add-on, once the re-buy period is over a prompt will alert you. When the blinds have increased to a certain level where the smaller denomination chips are no longer required, you will also receive a prompt to suggest the lower denomination chips are exchanged by the dealer for higher denomination chips. This reduces the number of chips in circulation during each hand and makes the chips more manageable.

In Game Options

Pressing "Options" during a tournament provides a few handy options that might be useful during the tournament.

Restart Level: If you need to pause a level you just need to press "Pause" (numeric key: '5'), although through experience, some home poker tournaments, especially those where a few too many beers are involved, the conversation can sidetrack play! In this instance you can restart a level.

Skip to next level: If a tournament is dragging on, especially a Freeze out where several players are out and they are keen to start the next tournament, you can skip one or several levels in order to increase the blinds to speed things up.

Poker Hands: It happens occasionally to even seasoned players, when you can't remember if a Flush is better than a Full House. This is one of the biggest draw backs with new players; being unable to remember the rank of poker hands. If you aren't sure, but don't want to ask the other players for fear of revealing your hand, you can use the Poker Hands screen to refresh your memory of the ranking of poker hands.

Order of Play: This screen runs through the order of play for the most popular type of poker, Texas Hold'em. This will be useful for new players or for players used to playing online poker where the dealer takes care of the order of play.

Payout calculator: Use this screen to work out how the poker prize pool should be distributed. Depending on the number of players, the split will change. The fewer the number of players, the greater portion of the prize pool goes to the winner. If there are more players, the prize pool will be split between more players.

You may notice the amount split to each player doesn't increase occasionally when the prize pool total is increased by one unit. This is by design; the amounts are rounded up to the nearest unit to avoid having to split a unit down into cents or pence, which I'm sure you'd prefer to avoid. If there is a floating unit, simply add it to the winner's total.

When selecting "Options" the timer will be paused so time isn't lost while you use one of the options. After closing the Options menu, press numeric key '5' to resume the tournament timer.

Once a tournament has ended, press "End" (Right selection button) and then select Quit. This will return you to the Main Tournament Menu, where you can either choose a new tournament or press "Quit" to exit the application.

Support

Where extensive testing has been performed on Poker Minder, it's impractical to physically test the application on every mobile phone on the market so we use phone emulators on a computer. This is an accurate representation of using the application on the actual phone but still slight variations in behaviour can exist.

If you stumble across a bug, let us know and we promise to fix it and send you a new version of the application for free. This is on condition that your phone is listed on the Supported Phones page; we cannot offer this guarantee for unsupported phones, not listed.

Poker Minder was built by a regular online and offline poker player; it has become a regular part of every home poker tournament either hosted or attended. We hope you find it a useful companion to your home poker tournaments and would like to hear your feedback.