How PokerNight.win works
Last updated 10 August 2026.
PokerNight.win is a free browser game of poker and blackjack that you play with people you invite. One person makes a table, shares the link, and everyone else opens it and sits down. There is no account to make, nothing to install, and no real money anywhere in it.
How do you start a game of poker with friends?
Three steps, and the whole thing takes under a minute.
One, make the table. Open PokerNight.win and pick a private table. You choose the game, the stakes and how many seats there are, or you take the defaults and change them later.
Two, send the link. Every table has its own link and a QR code. Send the link in a group chat, or hold up the QR code if the people you are playing with are in the same room, which is the faster option and the one most nights actually use.
Three, everyone sits down. Whoever opens the link picks a nickname and takes a seat. They do not sign up, download anything, or give an email address. The host deals when the table is ready.
You do not need a full table to start. A table can be filled with bots, so one person can deal a hand immediately and have the bots give up their seats one at a time as real players arrive. That also makes PokerNight.win usable for learning a variant without an audience.
What does PokerNight.win cost?
Nothing, and there is no version of it that costs something. There is no subscription, no chip store, and no paid tier. Most importantly for a poker game: PokerNight.win takes no rake. One hundred percent of every pot goes to the player or players with the best hand, which is not true of the club apps most home games move to.
Which poker games can you play?
Five poker variants, plus blackjack as its own game mode.
- Texas Hold'em. Two hole cards each, five community cards, the standard game.
- Pineapple. Three hole cards, and you discard one before the flop.
- Crazy Pineapple. Three hole cards, and you discard one after the flop instead, so you act on more information.
- Pot-Limit Omaha. Four hole cards, and you must use exactly two of them at showdown. Betting is pot-limit, so no bet or raise can exceed the size of the pot.
- Bomb Pot. Everybody antes and the hand goes straight to the flop, with no preflop betting round at all. It can also be sprinkled into a Hold'em game every few hands rather than played on its own.
Poker runs either as a cash table, where players buy in and cash out whenever they like, or as a tournament in freezeout, rebuy or unlimited format, with a blind clock and a payout structure.
How many people can play at one table?
Between six and ten seats, set by the host, and nine by default. Bots fill any seat nobody is sitting in, so a table is playable from the first person who arrives.
Is the deal actually fair?
Yes, and the specific reasons matter more than the assurance. Every hand, PokerNight.win shuffles the deck using the Fisher-Yates algorithm, which makes all 52-card orderings equally likely, seeded from the cryptographic random number generator rather than the ordinary one a game would normally reach for.
The shuffle runs on the server and the deck is never sent to any browser, so there is nothing in the page for a player to inspect and nothing for a modified client to read. No player is ever sent another player's hole cards. Bots are ordinary players in this respect: they see exactly what a human in their seat would see, and no more.
Is any real money involved?
No money passes through PokerNight.win. The chips are play chips, nothing can be deposited or cashed out, and there is nothing to win from the site.
What PokerNight.win does have is a settle-up ledger, and it is worth being precise about it. If the host sets a cash value per chip, the ledger tracks what each player bought in for and what they finished with, then works out the smallest set of payments that squares everyone up. That is arithmetic on a scoreboard. Any money that changes hands does so directly between the players, away from the site, in whatever way they already settle up.
What does the site know about you?
Close to nothing, because there is nowhere to put it. PokerNight.win has no accounts and sets no cookies. You are a nickname in a room for as long as the room exists.
A table is deleted about ninety seconds after the last person leaves it, and a table where no hand has been dealt for two hours is cleaned up as well. Private tables are not listed anywhere, are not indexed by search engines, and cannot be found by browsing. There is a separate Play now pool of at most three public tables so that somebody arriving alone can be matched into a game, and joining that pool is a choice the host makes.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. PokerNight.win is built for a phone first, since that is what people have in their hands at a kitchen table, and the QR code exists precisely for the case where everyone is in the same room. It runs in the browser on any modern phone, tablet or computer, with nothing to install.
Where do the detailed rules live?
The FAQ answers the specific questions in more depth: how the blinds and the button move, what a side pot is, how the blind clock behaves when a tournament takes a break, how payouts are decided, and what happens to a player who busts.