Customer Reviews

Poker Genie Home Tournament Manager Timer

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Very Convenient for home tourneys. I love my genie. Pros and Cons lists I find help others the best instead of a paragraph full of nonsense. Straigh to the point.

-Pros-

- Bright lED lights, can seriously be seen from
40 feet away (I've tried)

- New Genie can be stood up and places anywhere,
or can be hung on a wall

- 2 options on a tourney: customization, and preset

- Easily arranges tournament schedual and chip distribution

- Small enough to take with you anywhere

-Cons-

- Alarm is way to loud

- No on and off switch

- A bit expensive

Overall I think it's a good machine. Not a bad gift for the poker player who has it all. Way better than a kitchen timer. I think the price is a little too high. It should be $20 less than the adverstised price. I've seen alarm clocks that do way more and cost a fourth of the price. It's like a calculator and a clock put together. The best thing about this is the peace of mind everyone gets because there is no one asking about the blinds and how much time is left. Shuffle up and deal and don't splash the pot. Adios

We got this for my husband. He loves it, all his poker buddies love it. They all want one. We saw it on a few other websites, Amazon had the best deal. Great purchase!!!

It's unfortunate that I have to give this product such a low rating, because there are good aspects to this product. We used it in custom tournament mode rather than letting it set up a tournament for us, although I did test that a bit in a non-game setting. Mostly, it did seem to work as advertised. However, there were several issues we found.

On the good side, it does have a good, bright easily-read display. Also it remembers whatever custom tournament settings you put into it after you unplug it, at least for a few days (haven't tested this over weeks or months).

The main issue is that the clock ran very slow. We discovered this by accident during our first round when a clock in the house with a chime "beat" the poker timer to the top of the hour, and not by a small amount. A timing test using a stopwatch on a smartphone during the second round showed that when 30 minutes elapsed, the poker timer was still showing 1 minute and 20 seconds left in the round. Some jokes were made about being on "poker time" (think "tropical island time"), the clock moving near lightspeed, or suggesting we break it open and try to figure out to overclock it to get it back on pace. We did continue to use the clock by mutual agreement through the rest of the tournament, but it was disturbing that a modern digital timer would be that far off. Maybe I got sent a bad poker timer, but it made us question the quality of the product , considering what I'd paid for it.

Other issues were less serious, but are noted below.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the alarm sound is loud and annoying, although fortunately it only lasts about 5 seconds when it goes off and it would be nice if it had a volume control. Also people have pointed out the lack of an on-off switch -- you pull out the power plug. You do have to hold a button down when powering up to set up a custom tournament, and also to erase those settings.

An annoyance in custom tournament mode is setting up the big blind. When you program the small blind and then move to the big blind, it defaults the big blind to the value of the *small* blind, meaning that you'd generally have to change it. It would make more sense to default the big blind value to double the small blind (the typical value) to make the setup of a custom tournament much quicker.

The manual is understandable, although there are a few places where there were supposed to be symbols (indicating buttons and such) which were replaced with gibberish (accented letters) and you would have to figure out the intended symbol.

very nice product. only bad thing is no volume control and no on/off switch. A bit expensive but amazon has it a best cost. All in all very satisfied with the product.

I have tried a few poker clocks and this one is, by far, the best! It easy easy to use and customize. This is the 2nd one I bought!

I love this timer, it's easy to use and to read. I only wish it could run on batteries as well so that it would be a little more portable. Another nice feature would be an on/off button, so you don't have to unplug it to re-set the timer for another tournament. Other than that, I would highly recommend this to anyone wanting to add a little something to their home poker games!

We have only used it a few times but the times we have it's been a nice product.

It makes me feel like a real Pro, playing Texas Holdem. It takes off the pressure from paying attention to the elapsed time. Nobody complains when using it. I just don't understand what Coming Soon means when it's already here.

I recently purchased the Poker Genie for the home tourneys my friends and I play.

I have to say we could not have been more pleased.

Programing is SIMPLE. I don't understand the couple of reviews about programming being difficult or unintuitive. I felt it was really straight forward.

And if you don't want to program a custom tourney, you can simply input some variables about your game (number of players, number of chips etc) and it will set up a tourney schedule for you.

The alarm was not NEARLY as loud as I read in one review. It is fine and it only last 5 seconds.

The rounds can be paused and started easily .. it works perfectly.

If you are on the fence .. this is the timer for you.

We had to purchase one of these for fundraising a few years ago and it was quite expensive. This is perfect for our fundraising this time and it is much cheaper, but the same quality. And it came in time for us to use right away. So happy to have found this on Amazon!