Poker Portal

A small Flask app I put together for tracking our low-stakes hold'em nights without having to keep a spreadsheet open all the time.

The idea is pretty simple: public pages for stats and session history, plus a small admin area for recording buy-ins, gross cashout results, actual paid-out cash, and notes. The data sits in a CSV audit log, so everything is append-only and easy to follow later.

What it does

• all-time leaderboard
• per-session pages
• per-player stat pages
• admin login for recording events
• open / closed session tracking
• actual cash payout tracking with paid_out events
• debt repayments and write-offs with debt_repayment / writeoff events
• session and player charts
• CSV import / export from the admin page
• append-only entries.csv ledger instead of overwriting old rows

Stack

Built with a pretty lightweight setup:

• Python
• Flask
• Jinja templates
• Chart.js
• plain CSS
• CSV event log for storage

Ledger model

The app treats data/entries.csv as the source of truth.

Each row is an event, not a final snapshot. Instead of editing an old row, I append another one. That keeps rebuys, corrections, payouts, and session state changes visible in the log instead of hiding them behind edits.

Current event types:

• buyin
• front
• debt_repayment
• writeoff
• cashout
• paid_out
• rollover_in
• payout_carry_in
• rollover_out
• note
• session_open
• session_close

A few examples:

• another buyin for a rebuy
• another cashout if chip counts are corrected later
• a paid_out event when someone is actually settled up
• a debt_repayment event when a front is repaid outside poker
• a writeoff event when a front will not be collected
• a note event for bookkeeping context
• session_open / session_close to mark whether a game night is still live

Accounting in the app keeps poker results separate from banker cashflow:

• poker investment is buyin + front + rollover_in
• poker net is cashout - poker investment
• real cash in is buyin + debt_repayment
• real cash out is paid_out
• rollover_out settles the source session without counting as cash out
• rollover_in enters play in the destination session without counting as cash in
• payout_carry_in records prior-session value carried into a later payout; it increases the destination payout due without counting as poker investment or cash in
• writeoff resolves a receivable without counting as cash in

Older ledgers may still contain paid, front_collected, or front_writeoff. The app reads those historical names as aliases for paid_out, debt_repayment, and writeoff.

It is still just a small side project, but I wanted the event model to stay clean enough that the numbers are easy to trust and the history is easy to read back through.

CSV format

Main file:

data/entries.csv

Header:

id,created_at,session_id,session_date,player_name,event_type,amount_cents,note,actor

Amounts are stored in cents to avoid floating-point issues.

Running it locally

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env
python app.py

Then open:

http://127.0.0.1:8000

Environment values

The app reads these from .env:

• SECRET_KEY
• ADMIN_USERNAME
• ADMIN_PASSWORD

Example:

SECRET_KEY=change-this
ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
ADMIN_PASSWORD=change-me

Notes

A few choices here were deliberate:

• no database for now
• no user accounts, just one admin login
• public-facing stats pages, admin-only controls
• CSV backup before importing a replacement ledger

If I ever decide to take it further, the first real upgrade would probably be moving the storage layer to SQLite while keeping the rest of the app roughly the same.