"Starting stack" is how a night opens. The setup panel offers it and says what it
means — "seats without their own stack start here" — and everything a dealer
looks at reads it: the puck, the action bar, what a player is allowed to bet.
The money side didn't. The bank check and the standings read `seat.stack`
directly, which is null for exactly those seats. Measured on a three-handed table
with a $200 starting stack and nobody's own stack typed in: the felt played for
$600, the bank check reported no chips in play and pronounced itself balanced,
and the standings — the list a dealer settles the night from — listed nobody at
all. Three players, six hundred dollars, and the tool's own accounting said the
table was empty.
Both now ask the same question the felt asks. The check reports $600 in play
against nothing taken, which is the truth: those chips have not been paid for.
Empty chairs are excluded, or the starting stack would make every one of them
look like somebody holding two hundred dollars — a ten-seat table would have
opened with $2,000 of imaginary chips.
Being told is only half of it. The verdict names the seats rather than saying
"somebody's rebuy probably wasn't recorded", because the dealer's next move is to
go to a particular chair and the tool knows which. And the seats holding the
table's starting stack — the dealer's own instruction, said once in the setup
panel — can be written down in one tap instead of six trips through Add chips.
Only those: what somebody's forgotten rebuy was is a question only the dealer can
answer, and guessing it would be the tool inventing money, which is the fault
this round is about.
14 new tests, with the stack source and the empty-chair test broken on purpose to
confirm they fail. Walked through in the browser from a cleared table: set the
starting stack, name three seats, and the panel goes from "balanced, no chips" to
"$600 more in chips than cash taken. Ann, Ben and Cal are holding chips with no
buy-in written down" — then to balanced, with the buy-ins recorded and undoable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015bnp7xKUPFFSpwkYNFaPgb
