Live Chip Tracker
Jun 2026
A phone-first, real-time chip tracker that keeps casual poker, blackjack, and 7½ nights honest with live balances, a shared ledger, and one-tap undo. Join a room with a 4-letter code, no accounts, no refresh.
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So a few of us wanted to play poker one night. We had the cards, we had snacks, we were fully ready to talk a big game. The one thing we didn't have? Chips. Not a single one.
You can still play without them, you just have to keep track of who has what in your head. We tried doing it in a notes app and it fell apart almost immediately. One hand in and it already felt like homework, everyone going "wait, how much do I have again?"
So instead of, you know, just going to find some chips, I built an app for it. Obviously.
Party Chips is basically a chip tracker that lives on everyone's phone. It does poker, blackjack, and 7½. You make a room, share the four-letter code, and people hop in with just a name. No app to install, no account, nothing. Pick a name and you're in.
I really wanted it to be hard to mess up, because game nights are chaos. So everything you do shows up in a shared feed, and if someone fumbles a bet, it's one tap to undo. Whoever made the room is the banker and can fix anyone's chips, settle a hand, or pay out the pot.
The part I actually care about: the chips always add up. Every change is one clean transaction, so the totals and the history can't drift apart. And undo isn't some special case, it's just another transaction that cancels the first one.
I learned that the annoying way. My first version kept a little counter on the side to be fast, and the second people started undoing stuff out of order, it just invented chips out of nowhere. The fix was boring: stop being clever, and add up the real history every time.
It's all live (that's Convex doing the heavy lifting), so nobody ever has to refresh or ask "did it update on your end?" Everyone's screen just moves together. I also made it look like a little velvet card room, felt and gold and chips that actually animate, because if I'm going to track pretend money I want it to feel fancy. You can even add it to your home screen and it behaves like a real app.
And no, we still don't own any poker chips. Honestly not sure we ever will.