Poker Buy-Ins & Table Stakes

In this guide we're going to teach you what a buy-in is and explain table stakes to you. Whether you play in cash games or tourneys this guide will teach you everything you need to know about poker buy-ins and table stakes. While it isn't imperative to learn about buy-ins or table stakes in order to play poker it's always something every beginner player should learn.

Buy-Ins

When you're playing in poker tournaments the buy-in is the amount of money it costs to play in tournament. In an online poker event you'll notice that the cost of joining a tournament will have two numbers and look like $10+$1. The $10 is how much money will go into the prize pool from your buy-in and the $1 is the tournament fee taken by the poker room. The entire $11 will be deducted from your account, but only $10 will go into the prize pool.

The buy-in when you're playing cash games is the amount of money that you bring to the table with you. Most online poker rooms have limits on how much you can bring to certain tables. For instance, if you're playing a 6-player cash game with $1/$2 blinds some tables will allow you to bring 20-50 big blinds to the table. This means that the maximum you could buy-in with to that table would be $50x2, which is obviously $100.

Table Stakes

The term table stakes is used to describe how much the blinds are in a cash game. If you're playing on a $1/$2 table than the table stakes would be $1/$2. If you're playing in a limit poker game you'd only be able to bet $1/$2 on the table. When you play online poker you'll notice that there are tons of table stakes available. You can find cash game poker table stakes starting at $.01/$.02 and going all the way up to $100/$200+ depending on the poker room you decide to play with. In online poker tournaments the table stakes always change. In most poker tourneys the table stakes will change every 5-15 minutes.

As you can see the buy-ins and table stakes aren't that important to learn because of the fact that it doesn't affect you during the actual game. It's good to know what these terms mean since people use these two terms on a very regular basis when talking about poker, but it isn't something you need to absolutely learn.