PokerTH is a free and open-source Texas Hold’em poker game that has been in continuous development since 2006. Written in C++ with the Qt framework, it lets you sit down at a table with up to nine computer opponents, play with friends over a local network, or join the official pokerth.net network and play against real people — including optional ranking games that count towards community standings. There is no advertising, no tracking and no real-money gambling: all chips are play money, so it is a genuine game rather than a casino front-end.

Key Features

• Complete Texas Hold’em rules — no-limit hold’em for 2 to 10 players, with a full betting engine covering blinds, side pots and showdowns.
• Computer opponents with adjustable difficulty — fill empty seats with bots so a full table is always possible in single-player mode.
• Four ways to play — local games against the computer, multiplayer on a LAN, your own dedicated pokerth.net-compatible server, or the official internet network.
• Tournament-style games — configure the starting stack, raise blinds by hand count or by the minute, set manual blind orders, action time-outs, a pause between hands and the GUI animation speed.
• Flexible game types — public games, registered-players-only games, invite-only games and ranking games, each with optional spectators.
• Full lobby — player list, game list, chat, emoji reactions and private messages that persist per account.
• Optional chat translation — translate incoming chat on demand (opt-in).
• Extensive customisation — 20 table themes, 11 card decks and several card backs, with themes importable and exportable as ZIP files.
• Translated interface — the desktop client ships 29 fully translated languages.
• Official browser client — a web client released in 2026 lets you play the same network from a modern browser, installable as a PWA, with no download or registration.

Why Use PokerTH?

PokerTH is one of the few mature, genuinely free poker games: the project has been running for nearly two decades, is actively maintained, and carries no monetisation of any kind. Because the casino is open source, you can run your own server for a private group or a club tournament and keep every hand on your own infrastructure. The game also scales from a quick solo session against bots to ten-handed online tables with ranking — the same engine and the same rules in both.

Use Cases

• Practice and learning — play offline against bots at a chosen difficulty to work on position, bet sizing and hand selection without risking anything.
• Playing with friends — host a private LAN or dedicated-server game for a home group.
• Community tournaments — the tournament options (blinds on a timer, starting stacks, ranking games) suit recurring club nights and online cups.
• Joining public tables — the official pokerth.net server hosts open games and seasonal rankings against other players.
• Poker software development — the server speaks a documented protocol buffer-based protocol, so alternative clients can be written against it.

Platforms

The current 2.1.10 release ships official builds for Windows (.exe installer), macOS (.dmg), Linux (.deb package, x86-64 archive and AppImage) and Android (.apk, including an arm64-v8a build). The browser client runs on desktop and mobile browsers and can be installed as a progressive web app.

Licence

Free and open source — AGPL-3.0. PokerTH is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later, with an additional permission covering linking with OpenSSL. The project was released under the GPL version 2 until it was relicensed to the AGPL in 2011.

Website

Official site, downloads and community forum: pokerth.net. Source code: github.com/pokerth/pokerth.

Similar tools

• XMage — open-source card game engine with full rules enforcement, if you prefer trading-card games to poker.