Two Plus Two Older Archives - Building a home Poker Table

I just finished building a table myself. I went thru all the same math you did, trying to come up with an ideal size. I wanted to be able to seat ten people, but discovered quickly I could not come up with a design to seat that many folks in grand style and was small enough to deal across easily. The deal rotates in my home game; if you have a designated dealer I think you could do whatever you wanted. So...

I had to come up with a good compromise. I don't like having to pitch a card any farther than six feet, and honestly, that's a stretch. So I decided to keep my table to that length. I whacked two feet off a standard sheet of plywood. Then, after much consternation and playing around with cardboard templates, I decided to round the corners using a 12" radius. The table looks just like the virtual tables at Planet Poker. A rectangle 4' x 6' affords ten people 24" of space each (two on each end, three down each side), and with tight corners I think everyone gets effectively that much.

I just had my inaugural game, and so far, so good. We had eight players plus an imaginary ninth (a TV tray where I kept the bank took up the space of one player) and everyone had plenty of room. We weren't sprawled out, but pretty close, so adding one more person would have been easy. FWIW, everyone loved it. Plus, I live in an apartment so keeping the table compact is a big plus for two reasons: it's easier to store, and my dining room, where I set it up, just ain't that big.

Since I had so many questions when building a table, and people routinely post questions about it, I'll throw in a couple more things I learned along the way (hope that's okay; I realize you weren't asking)...

Know which plywood you're buying for the tabletop. I didn't know a thing about woodworking when I started this project, and so took along a friend of mine who claimed to. Operative word: claimed. I *thought* I was getting the best grade of plywood, based on what he told me. Not so. It was 3/4" A/C. The stuff was stacked a couple dozen sheets deep, and the whole stack had a bit of a bow to it. My buddy assured me that would disappear. Nope. That SOB. Whatever. Anyway, I had to build a frame out of pine 1"x4"s to glue/screw to the bottom of the tabletop to get rid of the bow. On a subsequent trip to the home store, I discovered that on a different aisle, there was hardwood plywood for $13 more that was, in fact, straight as a... well, you know. GET THAT STUFF!!!

About the felt: my favorite to play on in the casinos has always been the card-suit cloth. I splurged and ordered that stuff online and it's worth every penny ($23/yard).

About the rail: I came up with what I think is a great design for a removable, casino-style rail that turned out fantastic. This post is already too long, so if anyone is interested, speak up and I'll detail how I built it in another post. I let a professional upholsterer finish it off, which is now the only part of the whole process I regret. Not that it doesn't look great (it does), but because I later found the pcpotato site where the guy shows how he upholstered his rail and now I know I could have done it myself and gotten results comparable to what I have now.

Misc: I used heavy-duty folding legs to finish it off. I got my foam at an upholstery-supply store and my vinyl at a fabric store. In retrospect, I think I could have used $2/yard carpet pad for the tabletop instead of the $7/yard foam I bought. I secured the foam with double-sided tape rather than spray-adhesive, since it keeps the foam in place and I won't have to scrape it off when it's time to replace it.

Blah, blah, blah. Hope you (or anyone) found something in this that helped. Good luck on your project.

George