What if someone can't pay after a poker game?
Settle the rest of the table first so nobody else is waiting on it, then treat the shortfall as a debt between two named people rather than a problem the whole table shares. Write down who owes whom and how much before anyone leaves the room.
The reason to settle everyone else first is practical. If the table waits for one person, five other settlements stay open and the record of what was owed decays fast — within a week nobody agrees on the numbers.
Whoever is owed should be a specific person, not the table. A shortfall split across five winners produces five small awkward debts that never get chased; assigning it to the single largest winner produces one, which does get settled.
The prevention is a buy-in limit agreed before the first hand. Most tables that hit this problem had no cap, and the player in question did not decide to overextend — they simply never hit a moment where anyone said out loud that they had.
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