What stakes are right for your Home Game?

When starting a home game one of the most important things to decide on is the stakes. The ideal stakes are stakes that feel substantial enough to make you care about the game, but not so much that losing would hurt your finances. This looks different for all players.

If you only want to spend $40 a week on poker and you play once a week, you don’t want to play in or set up a $40 buy-in game. that’s because people are expected to rebuy if they get felted. So you should always have a budget of at least 2 buy-ins for whatever game you’re playing.

At this point, you decide on a $20 buy-in game, and for simplicity’s sake, we’ll say you’re playing Hold’em at your game. What should the blinds be? Generally, the buy-in should be at least 100 big blinds, so $.10/.20 should be the maximum stakes for the game. You could make it $.05/.10 so stacks last longer, but ultimately that’s your decision. You will need 5-cent chips for this game, which is rare in chip sets. Or you could use $5 chips and just divide all chip values by 100.