How do you keep score in poker without chips?
Track two numbers per player: total bought in, and the amount they finish with. Everything in between is bookkeeping you do not need. The difference between those two numbers is their result, and the results must add up to zero.
Recording every bet is the trap. It is slow, it stops the game, and it produces a ledger nobody checks. Buy-in and cash-out are the only two figures the settlement depends on.
The zero-sum check is the part people skip and the part that catches errors. If the results do not cancel out, the difference is exactly the size of the buy-in or cash-out that was recorded wrong.
If you want the running stacks as well — so bets and pots are tracked live rather than reconstructed — that is the point at which a phone earns its place over a sheet of paper.
The full answer
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