The Championship Finale
The season pot, the freeroll, auto-qualification, the Play-In Satellite, rank-scaled starting stacks, and how a season ends with a champion.
A season needs an ending. The Championship Finale is it: a freeroll, funded by a pot everyone has been feeding all season, played by the players who earned their way in.
Nobody pays to enter. They have been paying all along, a couple of dollars at a time, and now they play for it.
Turn it on with Season Championship? → Yes when you set up the season.
The season pot
Every game night, a small amount per entry goes into the season pot. You set it with Freeroll $ per Game (Classic uses $2).
That is it. Ten players a night, twenty nights, two dollars each: your finale has a $400 prize pool that cost nobody an extra cent on the night. The season dashboard shows the pot growing all season, which is a surprisingly effective motivator.
The pot is locked once the season is In Progress, along with the format. You cannot change the deal halfway through, which is exactly right.
Who gets in
Three gates, in this order. A player has to clear the first one before the other two even look at them.
1. The minimum-games qualifier
Min. Games to Qualify is the attendance floor. Classic sets it to 8 games of a 20-game season, which is 40%.
This is the gate people forget, and it is the one that causes the arguments, so say it out loud at the start of the season: if you do not play 40% of the games, you cannot win the championship. It does not matter how many points you have.
It is not a tiebreak or a penalty. A player who has not reached the minimum is not ranked at all. On the season dashboard they show grayed out, with a “Needs N More Games” note, and they sit below every qualified player no matter how well they have played. When the finale field is drawn, it is drawn only from qualified players.
Why it exists: it is the counterweight to RankPoints. Read the Points Systems chapter and you will meet Nia, who turns up for one night, finishes 2nd in a big field, and lands 5th in the standings on a single appearance. That is RankPoints working as designed, and without an attendance floor it is also an exploit: play once, play well, never come back, win the league. The minimum says you have to be a member of the league, not a tourist.
The two settings work as a pair, and they pull in opposite directions on purpose. RankPoints asks “how well did you play?” The minimum-games qualifier says “…across enough of the season to count.” Set the minimum to 0 and you are ranking everyone from their first game, which is fine, but you should mean it.
2. The auto-qualify spots
Auto-Qualify Spots decides how many players are in on merit. Classic uses the top 8.
Finish the season inside that number, having met the minimum, and you are in the finale, free.
3. The Play-In Satellite
Everyone else who qualified, down to a rank you choose, plays a satellite for the last seat(s). Classic: ranks 9 through 12 play for 1 seat.
This is a genuinely good piece of league design and worth copying. It keeps the middle of the leaderboard alive right to the last night of the season. Ninth place is not “nearly made it”, it is “still in it”, and that changes how much the back half of your field cares.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Play-In Satellite | Yes or No. |
| Seats Awarded | How many finale seats the satellite gives out. Classic: 1. |
| Last Rank in the Satellite | How far down the standings the play-in reaches. Classic: 12. |
There is no “first rank” setting, on purpose. The satellite always begins at the rank immediately below the last auto-qualifier. With 8 auto-qualify spots, it starts at 9, and there is nothing to configure.
That is not laziness, it is the only safe rule. If you could set the start yourself and put it at 10, rank 9 would fall into a gap: not auto-qualified, and not given a shot either. They would be silently dropped from the championship they had spent a season earning a place in. So the app derives the start, and no player can ever be stranded.
The app tells you the band it worked out, right under the setting:
Ranks 9 to 12 play for 1 finale seat.
Set the last rank at or above your auto-qualify count and it will say so plainly, rather than letting you find out on finale night that nobody qualified for the play-in.
The satellite’s own blinds and stack
The satellite is a quick, disposable game whose only job is to hand out a seat, so it does not use your league’s normal structure. It gets its own, and these settings are the satellite’s, not the finale’s:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Starting Stack | A flat stack for every satellite player. Classic: 1,000. |
| First Small Blind / First Big Blind | Where it starts. Classic: 25 / 50. |
| Blind Length (Min) | How long each level lasts. Classic: 5 minutes, and no breaks. |
| Blind Speed | Turbo doubles the blinds every level (the Classic default, and brutal, which is the point). Gradual climbs the standard ladder instead. |
It is a freezeout, there is no buy-in, and there is no money in it. The only prize is the seat.
Launch it from the season dashboard with Launch Play-In Satellite. It runs as a normal tournament, and the winner is added to the finale field.
The Championship Finale settings.
When the season is too small
Leagues do not always fill the shape you designed for them. The app resolves the awkward cases rather than refusing to run:
- Fewer qualified players than auto-qualify spots? Everyone who qualified is in the finale, and no satellite runs. A 6-player qualified field with 8 auto spots is simply a 6-player finale.
- Fewer satellite contenders than seats? They fold straight into the finale. There is no point running a 1-player satellite for 1 seat, so the app does not.
- Nobody met the minimum? There is no ranked field, and so no finale. If that happens, your minimum was set too high for the season you actually ran.
The finale itself
Launch it with Launch Championship Finale. It is a real tournament, played on the live screen like any other.
It plays like one of your league nights
The finale uses your league’s normal format: the same blind structure, the same level lengths, the same chip set your regular games use. There is no separate finale structure to configure, and nothing to set up. That is deliberate. The championship should feel like the league it crowned, not like a different game.
Four things are changed for you, and nothing else:
- The buy-in is $0. It is a freeroll. Nobody pays.
- The prize pool is the season pot, added straight in.
- The payouts are the finale split (below), not your usual payout table.
- The seats are pre-filled with the qualified field: your auto-qualifiers, plus the satellite winner.
So if you want the finale to play faster or deeper than a normal league night, change the league’s format before you launch it. The Turbo setting you may have seen belongs to the Play-In Satellite, not to the finale.
Rank-scaled starting stacks
Your chip stack in the finale depends on where you finished in the season.
The season winner sits down with the biggest stack. Eighth place sits down with the smallest. Everyone is in with a chance, but the player who dominated all season starts with an advantage they earned. Without this, a twenty-week season gets decided by one night of cards, and the best player has no edge at all.
Finale Chip Distribution has three modes:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Classic | The ladder. Top seed starts with 120 big blinds, each rank below drops 5 BB, with a floor of 90 BB. So 1st gets 120, 2nd gets 115, 3rd gets 110, and nobody drops below 90. |
| Even | Everyone gets the same stack (Stack Per Player (BB)). A pure freeroll, season position ignored. |
| Custom | The app gets out of your way and you hand out chips yourself. |
The season dashboard shows you the exact resulting stacks under Finale Chip Stacks, seat by seat, before you start. Read them out and start dealing.
The payouts
Finale Payout Split (%) splits the season pot between first, second, and third. It must total 100. Classic uses 55 / 30 / 15.
And then it is over
Play it out, and the winner is your League Champion, badged as such on the standings forever.
The end of a season.
End Season closes it and makes it read-only. If you closed it by accident, Reopen Season exists.
Then you create the next season under the same league, and the whole thing starts again with everyone back on zero. Which, if you have done this right, is the moment somebody says “right, I’m winning it this year”.