Hard Cover For Poker Table
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A typical casino poker table has a length of between 92 and 104 inches (234 and 264 cm), a width of 44 inches (112 cm), and a height of 30 inches (76 cm). You can expect to also add 4 inches (10 cm) to the length and width for the outer “racetrack” railing. The weight commonly ranges from 170 to 200 pounds (77 to 91 kilos ) but can go up to as high as 350 pounds (159 kilos).
Outside of casino models, there is no official or standard sizing for poker tables as it all depends on who is making it and the shape of the table. In fact, there is pretty much a table out there to fit any space. From roll-up poker mats to octagon, round, and oval folding poker tables, with and without legs. And, of course, you have the high-end professional versions that are meant to simulate casino quality tables. Let’s take a look at the various types and shapes found in home poker tables, what they are made of, and how many people they typically seat.
Please note, dimensions will be listed in the following format in inches: Length x Width x Height (cm conversion)
Hard Cover For Poker Table Set
Oval Poker Tables
Oval poker tables are the most common design and home models usually fold up for storage.
- Sizes
Permanent home versions are often 92x44x30 (234x112x76). Foldable models are usually about 84x42x30 (213x107x76) but can be as small as around 73 inches long and 32 inches wide. - Weight
54 to 85 pounds. - Materials
Tops are usually felt-covered wood, the railing vinyl, and the legs steel. Materials can vary based on the quality and price point. - Number Of Players
Most oval tables are designed to hold 9 or 10 players, however, some of the smaller models typically only hold 6 or 7 comfortably. To truly hold 9 or 10 players, 84-inch width and up is recommended.
Octagon Poker Tables
Octagonal tables have grown in popularity since most home poker games consist of 4-6 people. These tables are nice and compact and handle that number of people easily.
- Sizes
48x48x30 (122x122x76) for foldable models. Tabletop versions are usually the same size but occasionally are found a bit bigger, around 50 inches wide. - Weight
45 to 60 pounds with legs, 20-40 pounds for tabletop versions. - Materials
Folding octagonal tables are usually felt-covered wood, the railing plastic and occasionally vinyl, with the steel legs. Tabletop versions are often felt-covered plastic, with a plastic border or “railing”. Again, materials can vary based on the quality and price point. - Number Of Players
Most octagon-shaped table, like this one found on Amazon , are designed to hold up to 8 players. However, most versions will comfortably hold 5 or 6.
Round Poker Tables
Round poker tables are actually the least common design you will see and are typically only available in permanent options.
- Sizes
48 to 60 inches wide. Tabletop versions are hard to find but are about 48 inches wide. - Weight
Too rare to put a common weight. - Materials
Varies. - Number Of Players
There’s a reason round tables are out of vogue; they just don’t hold as many people as oval or octagonal models do. Most round poker tables hold 4 people, 5 if you squeeze in.
Square Poker Tables
Square tables are also rare and about 34 inches across. Since they only hold 4 people, most people opt for a different shape, or just use a square table from Walmart. Even so, if you only hold small games, they can be a decent option.. if you can find one. Tabletop versions that can be set on an existing dining room table do exist, however, my advice is to instead get a rectangular mat… covered in the next section.
Hard Cover For Poker Table Games
What About Poker Mats?
Poker mats are an excellent option for the occasional impromptu card game. They are light and portable as is humanly possible, since they are made of either cloth or rubber, and typically come in a rectangular or oval shape. Poker mats, like this one found on Amazon, are usually about 72×36 (183×91).
Space Needed For A Poker Table
Ideally, you want at least 3 feet (1 meter) of clearance around a poker table to allow for adequate seating and movement around the room. If you have a small square poker room, I would suggest an octagon-shaped table, as these seem to fit best in small spaces while allowing for a maximum number of people to be seated. If your room is rectangular, any oval table like this nice Amazon model, that fits within the parameters of the space will do fine.
Important Tip: When choosing a poker table make sure that you look at the actual total dimensions of the table including any railings. Often, the sale listing of a poker table will only include the dimensions of the actual playing area of the table
What About Chairs?
Remember to always leave ample space and elbow room around your poker table for people to be able to get in and out of their chairs and maneuver their poker chips. I would recommend just getting folding chairs for your poker buddies unless you are playing at a dining room table that already has nice sturdy chairs. On that front, I suggest that you invest in some heavy-duty chairs that will hold players who might be on the heavy side. Here are some that should do the job nicely. They have a really high weight capacity.
Do Covering Types Affect Table Size?
All types of table coverings can be affixed to any table dimension. Even so, while covering types do not directly affect the space that a table will fit, you may want to consider using a faster cloth in more enclosed spaces. With standard cloth, the cards will not move across the surface and someone dealing at the end of the table in a recreational game will have a hard time sliding the cards all the way to the other end on slower cloth. There are two common options for poker table coverings, or felt; standard felt or speed cloth.
- Standard Felt
This is the standard choice for the most poker tables, especially lower-priced versions. The surface has a roughness to it and often it is challenging to get the cards to slide all the way out to where you want them while dealing. However, this is the least expensive surface and is fine for most players. Even so, some people like to upgrade to a “professional” surface, called speed cloth. - Speed Cloth
A lot of poker enthusiasts and professional poker players prefer the surface they play on to be a bit faster than standard felt. Therefore, they often want to play with speed cloth. Made of a more slippery type of polyester, you will have no issues getting cards to slide from one end of the table to the other end while dealing. However, players not used to a faster surface may grumble that the cards are sliding too fast, and sometimes flying off the table. The vast majority of poker tables do not come standard with speed cloth, as it is usually an upgrade only if one is willing to pay for the option.
A Brief History of Poker Table Sizes
The earliest card tables show up in the 1700s in response to the growing popularity of card games around Europe. In fact, it was common for people to buy card tables as fine furniture for their home, prominently displayed. Many versions even had a folding top, which allowed them to function as another piece of furniture when not in use. The wealthier classes paid exorbitant amounts for higher-end tables. Most of the designs were semicircular or oval and typically 36 inches in diameter.
For more about finding the right poker table, I also wrote a comprehensive poker table guide to help you in your search. Thanks for stopping by!
Maria Konnikova is a New York Times bestselling author and contributor to The New Yorker with a doctorate in psychology. She decided to learn how to play poker to better understand the role of luck in our lives, examining the game through the lens of psychology and human behavior. This excerpt is adapted from her new book, “The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win,” which is available June 23.
For many years, my life centered around studying the biases of human decision-making: I was a graduate student in psychology at Columbia, working with that marshmallow-tinted legend, Walter Mischel, to document the foibles of the human mind as people found themselves in situations where risk abounded and uncertainty ran high. Dissertation defended, I thought to myself, that’s that. I’ve got those sorted out. And in the years that followed, I would pride myself on knowing so much about the tools of self-control that would help me distinguish myself from my poor experimental subjects. Placed in a stochastic environment, faced with stress and pressure, I knew how I’d go wrong — and I knew precisely what to do when that happened.
Fast-forward to 2016. I have embarked on my latest book project, which has taken me into foreign territory: the world of No Limit Texas Hold ’em. And here I am, at my first-ever tournament. It’s a charity event. I’ve been practicing for weeks, playing online, running through hands, learning the contours of basic tournament poker strategy.
I get off to a rocky start, almost folding pocket aces, the absolute best hand you can be dealt, because I’m so nervous about messing up and disappointing my coach, Erik Seidel — a feared crusher considered one of the best poker players in the world. He’s the one who finagled this invitation for me in the first place, and I feel certain that I’m going to let him down. But somehow, I’ve managed to survive out of the starting gate, and a few hours in, I’m surprised to find myself starting to experience a new kind of feeling. This isn’t that hard. This is fun. I’m not half-bad.
This moment, this I’m not half-bad making its fleeting way through my brain, is the first time I notice a funny thing start to happen. It’s as if I’ve been cleaved in two. The psychologist part of my brain looks dispassionately on, noting everything the poker part of me is doing wrong. And the poker player doesn’t seem to be able to listen. Here, for instance, the psychologist is screaming a single word: overconfidence. I know that the term “novice” doesn’t even begin to describe me and that my current success is due mostly to luck. But then there’s the other part of me, the part that is most certainly thinking that maybe, just maybe, I have a knack for this. Maybe I’m born to play poker and conquer the world.
The biases I know all about in theory, it turns out, are much tougher to fight in practice. Before, I was working so hard on grasping the fundamentals of basic strategy that I didn’t have the chance to notice. Now that I have some of the more basic concepts down, the shortcomings of my reasoning hit me in the face. After an incredibly lucky straight draw on a hand I had no business playing — the dealer helpfully tells me as much with a “You’ve got to be kidding me” as I turn over my hand and win the pot — I find myself thinking maybe there’s something to the hot hand, the notion that a player is “hot,” or on a roll. Originally, it was taken from professional basketball, from the popular perception that a player with a hot hand, who’d made a few shots, would continue to play better and make more baskets. But does it actually exist — and does believing it exists, even if it doesn’t, somehow make it more real? In basketball, the psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky, and Robert Vallone argued it was a fallacy of reasoning — when they looked at the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers, they found no evidence that the hot hand was anything but illusion. But in other contexts, mightn’t it play out differently? I’ve had the conventional thinking drilled into me, yet now I think I’m on a roll. I should bet big. Definitely bet big.
That idea suffers a debilitating blow after a loss with a pair of jacks — a hand that’s actually halfway decent. After a flop that has an ace and a queen on it — both cards that could potentially make any of my multiple opponents a pair higher than mine — I refuse to back down. I’ve had bad cards for the last half an hour. I deserve to win here! I lose over half my chips by refusing to fold — hello, sunk cost fallacy! We’ll be seeing you again, many times. And then, instead of reevaluating, I start to chase the loss: Doesn’t this mean I’m due for a break? I can’t possibly keep losing. It simply isn’t fair. Gambler’s fallacy — the faulty idea that probability has a memory. If you are on a bad streak, you are “due” for a win. And so I continue to bet when I should sit a few hands out.
It’s fascinating how that works, isn’t it? Runs make the human mind uncomfortable. In our heads, probabilities should be normally distributed — that is, play out as described. If a coin is tossed ten times, about five of those should be heads. Of course, that’s not how probability actually works — and even though a hundred heads in a row should rightly make us wonder if we’re playing with a fair coin or stuck in a Stoppardian alternate reality, a run of ten or twenty may well happen. Our discomfort stems from the law of small numbers: We think small samples should mirror large ones, but they don’t, really. The funny thing isn’t our discomfort. That’s understandable. It’s the different flavors that discomfort takes when the runs are in our favor versus not. The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy are actually opposite sides of the exact same coin: positive recency and negative recency. We overreact to chance events, but the exact nature of the event affects our perception in a way it rightly shouldn’t.
We have a mental image of the silly gamblers who think they’re due to hit the magic score, and it’s comforting to think that won’t be us, that we’ll recognize runs for what they are: statistical probabilities. But when it starts happening in reality, we get a bit jittery. “All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us,” Don Quixote tells his squire, Sancho Panza, in Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel, “because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, from which it follows that since the bad has lasted so long a time, the good is close at hand.” We humans have wanted chance to be equitable for quite some time. Indeed, when we play a game in which chance doesn’t look like our intuitive view of it, we balk.
Frank Lantz has spent over twenty years designing games. When we meet at his office at NYU, where he currently runs the Game Center, he lets me in on an idiosyncrasy of game design. “In video games where there are random events — things like dice rolls — they often skew the randomness so that it corresponds more closely to people’s incorrect intuition,” he says. “If you flip heads twice in a row, you’re less likely to flip heads the third time. We know this isn’t actually true, but it feels like it should be true, because we have this weird intuition about large numbers and how randomness works.” The resulting games actually accommodate that wrongness so that people don’t feel like the setup is “rigged” or “unfair.” “So they actually make it so that you’re less likely to flip heads the third time,” he says. “They jigger the probabilities.”
For a long time, Lantz was a serious poker player. And one of the reasons he loves the game is that the probabilities are what they are: they don’t accommodate. Instead, they force you to confront the wrongness of your intuitions if you are to succeed. “Part of what I get out of a game is being confronted with reality in a way that is not accommodating to my incorrect preconceptions,” he says. The best games are the ones that challenge our misperceptions, rather than pandering to them in order to hook players.
Poker pushes you out of your illusions, beyond your incorrect comfort zone — if, that is, you want to win. “Poker wasn’t designed by a game designer in the modern sense,” Lantz points out. “And it’s actually bad game design according to modern-day conceptions of how video games are designed. But I think it’s better game design because it doesn’t pander.” If you want to be a good player, you must acknowledge that you’re not “due” — for good cards, good karma, good health, money, love, or whatever else it is. Probability has amnesia: Each future outcome is completely independent of the past. But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us. We’ll be rewarded, eventually, if we’re only patient. It’s only fair.
But here’s the all-too-human element: We’re just fine with runs when they are in our favor. Hence the hot hand. When we’re winning, we don’t think we’re due for a change in the least. If the run is on our side, we’re thrilled to let it continue indefinitely. We think the bad streaks are overdue to end yesterday, but no one wants the good to end.
Why do smart people persist in these sorts of patterns? As with so many biases, it turns out that there may be a positive element to these illusions — an element that’s closely tied to the very thing I’m most interested in, our conceptions about luck. There’s an idea in psychology, first introduced by Julian Rotter in 1966, called the locus of control. When something happens in the external environment, is it due to our own actions (skill) or some outside factor (chance)? People who have an internal locus of control tend to think that they affect outcomes, often more than they actually do, whereas people who have an external locus of control think that what they do doesn’t matter too much; events will be what they will be. Typically, an internal locus will lead to greater success: People who think they control events are mentally healthier and tend to take more control over their fate, so to speak. Meanwhile, people with an external locus are more prone to depression and, when it comes to work, a more lackadaisical attitude.
Sometimes, though, as in the case of probabilities, an external locus is the correct response: Nothing you do matters to the deck. The cards will fall how they may. But if we’re used to our internal locus, which has served us well to get us to the table to begin with, we may mistakenly think that our actions will influence the outcomes, and that probability does care about us, personally. That we’re due to be in a certain part of the distribution, because our aces have already been cracked twice today. They can’t possibly fall yet again. We’ll forget what historian Edward Gibbon warned about as far back as 1794, that “the laws of probability, so true in general, [are] so fallacious in particular” — a lesson history teaches particularly well. And while probabilities do even out in the long term, in the short term, who the hell knows. Anything is possible. I may even final-table this charity thing.
One thing is for sure: Unless I cure my distaste for bad runs and the sense of exuberance that envelops me during the good ones, I am going to lose a lot of money. And maybe if I lose it for long enough, I’ll eventually stop thinking that the cards owe me anything at all — whether that’s continued success or an end to a streak of bad runouts. Or that’s the hope. Otherwise I’ll be one broke poker player.
From the book “THE BIGGEST BLUFF” by Maria Konnikova, to be published on June 23, 2020, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Maria Konnikova.
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