Before you sit down to play in a cash game, you need to buy chips. The question is often asked: “What is the correct amount to buy-in for?” There are several answers to that question.

First, the card room will have a minimum buy-in. For example, yesterday I was playing 2/4 Texas Hold’em and the house minimum was a 50 buy-in. Most players were buying in for 100. Ask when you make your buy-in what the average or normal buy-in is for the table. Let’s look more closely at the minimum buy-in of 50 at this 2/4 table. If each round of betting is bet at the minimum then a hand will cost 2 pre-flop, 2 on the flop and 4 on the turn and 4 on the river or 12 total. Add one raise per round and it takes 24 to play one hand to the river or nearly half the minimum buy-in. This is why many players will not come to the table with a minimum buy-in.

Once you are at the table, then in many houses there is a “short-buy”, which is simply a smaller amount (less then the minimum to sit down); at the house I played yesterday with the 50 minimum buy-in, the short rebuy was 25. Some players will sit at a table and make several “short buys” if they are losing. The opposite strategy is to always have the table “covered”, which means you will buy-in for more than the minimum and will always have enough chips to cover any bets that can be made in a single hand.

There are various thoughts and strategies on how big of a stack you keep in front of you. For the beginner, the best advice is to buy-in at the average and never get so short that you could be bet all-in; you don’t want to hit a monster hand and not have enough chips to bet it all the way. Remember you can purchase more chips between hands but not while you are in a hand.

-This is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #24

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Poker Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.