Building a home Poker Table

[wacki]

I am building a home poker table. I have one that suits 6 people just fine, but is just too small for 10 people. I want to build a ten man poker table.

Right now I'm thinking of just getting a 4'x8' sheet of plywood and ovaling it out. So it will be 4' wide and 7' long oval. Which means I get 22" per person for table space. But i'm not sure if I should go longer or not.


With a standard table width of 4' (I prefer this width) this is the amount of inches per person when factoring in the length of the table.

8' 24.672" per person
7.5' 23.472"
7' 22.272"
6.5' 21.072"
6' 19.872"

with a 3'9" wide table you get
8' 24.33" per person
7.5' 23.13"
7' 21.93"
6.5' 20.73"
6' 19.53"


Any thoughts / recommendations on table dimensions for a 10 man table?

[Cubswin]

Use the full 8 feet of plywood. Holdem tables are 96 inches long by 48 wide.

regards
cubs

[wacki]

cool, will do, thanks for the info.

[Slacker13]

96 inches is to accomodate a dealer, without a dealer seat it only needs to be 82" long.

[wacki]

Just curious, where did you buy your table from, and how much was it?

[Slacker13]

I got it at http://www.pokeroutlet.com
I got the one with the folding legs for $429 delivered. The intentions were to carry it back and forth between a few different houses we play at but the damn thing is much heavier than we expected, it says 70lbs but it feels three times that. Very nice table though. I ended up just converting a spare room into a poker room to leave it there permanent.

[Slacker13]

I bought my table, it measures 82" x 42" x 30", and seats 10 comfortably. I then went to a restaurant supply company and ordered 10 banquet chairs with extra padding, they only cost $35 each. Hope this helps.

[georgejetson]

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

[jumpthru]

Okay, I will speak up. Could you detail how you built the removable rail.

[georgejetson]

Here goes:

Start with a piece of wood out of which you intend to cut your tabletop. Doesn't matter what size, shape, etc. Let's say you're going to ovalize a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood. Get another sheet the same size to use for the rail. (I used MDF instead of more plywood because it was much cheaper, and didn't need to be anywhere near as strong). The sheet for the rail probably doesn't need to be any thicker than 1/2".

Draw the template for your table on the sheet for the rail, whatever shape you want. Put that sheet (MDF, whatever) on top of the first and square it up. Clamp the sheets together, and with a saber saw, cut out the table according to your template. Now you'll work with each piece seperately; your goal is to cut out the centers.

For the rail, *carefully* draw a new line all the way around your MDF (use your compass and straight edge), inset 4" (or however wide you want your rail). Now cut out this center portion you just drew, and you're left with a one-piece rail, 4" wide that squares perfectly with your tabletop.

Next, follow the same procedure with the actual tabletop, but this time only go in half as far as you did for the rail. So, if your rail was the outer 4" of the top sheet, cut off the outer 2" of the bottom sheet. Square these two pieces back up, then glue and screw them together. Now you've got a one-piece rail that lifts on and off easily from the tabletop. Think of it as a lid of sorts.

I've found that just the thickness of my tabletop cloth is all it takes to keep the rail snug. I haven't bothered to semi-permanently attach it yet. When I do, I'm simply going to put some tee-nuts on the underside of the rail and run bolts through from the bottom of the tabletop. Or, plain old wood screws would do the trick. One thing that may or may not bother you: Because of the thickness of my tabletop padding, there is a 1/2" gap between the bottom of the "lip" underneath the rail and the bottom of the actual tabletop. You can't see it, can't feel it unless you reach under there. If you're aiming for perfection, either add yet another piece of plywood to the equation the same thickness as your tabletop padding and repeat step two, or *carefully* cut out your tabletop padding to stop at the edge of the rail.

I hope this makes sense. If not, I've got a couple photos I can scan and try to post.

As I mentioned in another post, there are some good instructions online (this thread even) for adding padding and vinyl to the finished rail. Check those out and avoid paying someone to do it.

Cheers,

George