Your first calcutta: a night-of checklist

The other guides on this site teach the theory — formats, payouts, syndicates, doctrine. This one is the piece of paper you actually carry on the night: who does what, what happens when, what you say from the block, and the two checks that prove the money before anyone reaches for a wallet.

A first calcutta fails in predictable places, and none of them are the auction. The auctioneer can be nervous, the bidding can be thin, the jokes can miss — the night survives all of it. What it doesn't survive is a rule announced after it mattered, a hammer price nobody wrote down, or a settle-up sheet that doesn't balance at midnight. Every item on this checklist exists to prevent one of those three deaths.

The week before

• Write the rules sheet. One page: the payout structure, any top cut and its beneficiary, the minimum bid, the scratch rule, whether syndicates may bid, and the payment deadline. The individual decisions are covered in payout structures and house rules — your job this week is just to decide and write them down.
• Fill three roles. An auctioneer (charisma, pace, no clipboard), a clerk (the clipboard: records every lot, buyer, and hammer price, and never bids), and a spotter (watches the back of the room so a raised hand in bad light doesn't become a dispute). At a small event one person can spot and clerk; the auctioneer must never clerk.
• Build the lot list. Every team or entrant, in the order they'll sell. Post it where the room will see it. If entries may change, mark the list "provisional until sale time" — then freeze it when the auction opens.
• Set up the app. Enter the lots and the payout percentages in CalcuttaCalc; the app forces the percentages to total 100, which is your first arithmetic guard rail. Do a two-minute dry run: fake hammer prices, fake result, check the settlement sheet reads sensibly.

Night of: the timeline

• T minus 60 minutes — the room. Lot list posted, rules sheet copied and scattered on tables, clerk's station set with the app open and a paper backup. Decide the auctioneer's stand and the spotter's sight lines now, not when the room is full.
• T minus 30 — registration. Bidders check in with the clerk. If bidders want budget caps (a smart idea for a first event), the clerk records each bidder's cap; the app enforces caps at the hammer, which spares you the worst conversation in the format — told at settlement, not at the hammer, that a buyer was in over their head. Syndicates declare themselves now: names, pledges, one designated bidder, per syndicates and pledges.
• T minus 10 — the announcement. Read the rules out loud. Verbatim beats charming; see the script below.
• T zero — the auction. Sell in the posted order. The clerk repeats every hammer back — "Lot 7, the Double-J team, to Maria, three hundred" — and enters it before the next lot opens. Pace: brisk on the early lots, patient on the favorites. If a lot draws silence, the auctioneer offers it at the minimum; if it still doesn't sell, apply your announced unsold-lot rule and move on.
• During the event. The clerk tracks scratches and applies the announced rule — the default doctrine is void the sale, refund the buyer, shrink the pot (house rules works the arithmetic). Nobody renegotiates anything mid-event; that's what the announcement was for.
• Results. Enter placings only when they're official from the judges or scorekeepers. The app turns them into payouts instantly; resist reading anything out until the checks below are done.

What you say from the block

Steal this and fill in your numbers: "Before the first lot, four things. One — the pot pays three places, fifty, thirty, twenty, with a ten percent cut to the arena fund, all computed off the gross pot. Two — minimum bid is fifty dollars, and every sale is final when the hammer falls, with payment due to the clerk tonight. Three — if a team scratches before it competes, that sale is void, the buyer is made whole, and the pot shrinks; after it competes, the sale stands. Four — this is a private, social auction among us: the app keeps score, people settle up in person, and I'm the one accountable for keeping it friendly and legal. Questions now, not at midnight."

The two checks that prove the sheet

Run these before announcing a single payout. Together they catch essentially every clerking error a calcutta can produce, using the reference event these guides share — a twelve-team ranch rodeo, $2,400 pot, 50/30/20:

Then read the results theatrically — third place first, champion last — and move straight to settlement while the room is still assembled: who owes what, who collects what, positions and syndicate shares line by line, exactly as worked in settling up. The app's settlement sheet is designed to be read aloud and checked by the people in it. If a buyer can't cover their hammer after all — the failure mode with its own page — apply the announced remedy calmly and in the open.

First-timer mistakes, ranked by how often they happen

• Announcing rules after they're needed. The scratch rule invented mid-scratch pleases no one. Everything in the script above is said before the first bid or it doesn't count.
• The auctioneer clerking their own auction. Two jobs, one adrenaline supply. The hammer price that never got written down is the most common hole in a first-timer's sheet.
• Letting "we'll settle next week" happen. Money memory decays overnight. Settle while everyone is in the room — it's five minutes with the sheet, and it's the difference between a tradition and a story about that one time.
• Skipping the dry run. Ten minutes with fake numbers the night before finds every setup mistake at zero cost.
• Over-engineering event one. First time out: one pot, three places, minimal options. The exotic structures will still be there next year, and by then you'll have a room that trusts the sheet.

Set up your first event in the app