How to Play Poker Without Money
Note: Please find out how to play poker elsewhere and just apply these rules to the game.
We played with pretzels or tortilla chips instead of money. If you have a ton of something small to count(easy to pick up and move) that doesn't roll around, that will be fine too. The good thing about food is the winners get to keep what they've won after all games are overwith, but you might not want to eat it after everyone touched it.
Start the first game of the sitting with the same amount of pieces for everyone.
I suggest 8 to 10 pieces if you have too much trouble decidiing on it, but it has been so long since I've played this that I'm unsure if I remember that correctly. I think that's what we tried the first time ever playing this, but I think we experimented around on different days with that. I think starting with at least 8 pieces is good.
You could bet on a pretzel or break a pretzel to represent less of an amount, but with tortilla chips only the number of pieces really count because it can be hard to remember someone breaking it. Please use a decent size to at least easily pick up and put somewhere. Then you count the number of pieces or parts of pretzels instead of money. One pretzel or piece of a tortilla chip is one piece. One pretzel is like $1, and one tortilla chip is like $1. Breaking up a pretzel into only up to four pieces is a good idea to represent halves (50 cents) or quarters(25 cents), but I don't think converting into a money amount was important to us as we would rather play with tortilla chips. One bag of pretzels or one bag of tortilla chips was plenty enough for 4 people to play with. They are less valuable than playing with money, so it may take some stress out of the game.
Any consecutive games you play, you keep what you have at the end of the game to start the next game unless you get zero (or see the options below).
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(Option A): This is the way we played except we never had anyone sit out of the game and the last sentence may not have appled. I add those choices here incase anyone really desires that. You can ignore those two sentences or one of them if you want.
The winning player decides whether the players who currently have zero stay in for the next game or not. If the player with zero stays in the game, they are given new pieces from outside the game in the amount of whatever the winning player chooses as long as it is less than or equal to the amount that everyone started with in the first game. That way the winning player gets to decide what kind of challenge thay want next if there is at least one player with zero. All players with lower amounts than what the player with zero gets to start with, have a choice to raise their amount to equal that amount if they want to.
(Option B): (We might have played like this too.)
All players who end with less than the starting amount of the first game, start the next game with one less than that amount.