Poker home games offer a great way to play poker with friends at very affordable stakes. 

If you set up a poker home game, you get to decide who gets to play and who doesn’t. You also get to decide the stakes and the buy-in.

If you’ve ever wanted to run a $20 buy-in poker cash game, this article is for you. Let’s take a look at how to divide poker chips for a $20 buy-in cash game.

Stakes and Chip Denominations for Your $20 Buy-In Poker Cash Game

The first and perhaps most important thing to decide is what stakes you want to play for your home cash game. For a $20 buy-in, we recommend that you play $0.05/$0.10.

At these stakes, the small blind is $0.05 and the big blind is $0.10. This gives each player a 200-big-blind stack, which is great for a cash game. Many poker rooms use 200 big blinds as the max buy-in for cash games.

Using these stakes, you need three different colors of poker chips to allow for this division of chips for each player:

• $0.05 chips x 20 = $1
• $0.25 chips x 32 = $8
• $1 chips x 11 = $12

You could add $0.10 chips into the mix if you wish, and end up with a division that looks something like this:

• $0.05 chips x 20 = $1
• $0.10 chips x 20 = $2
• $0.25 chips x 20 = $5
• $1 chips x 11 = $12

You could also eliminate some of the $1 chips (which are pretty big for a $0.05/$0.10 game), and end up with this:

• $0.05 chips x 40 = $2
• $0.10 chips x 40 = $4
• $0.25 chips x 40 = $8
• $1 chips x 6 = $6

This division requires more overall chips, but might make betting, raising, and calling a more smooth process for all of your players.

One more note – when you’re buying your first chip set for a home game, you’re better off purchasing a set with more chips right from the start. Your home cash game might become very popular, and you’d rather have more than enough chips than not enough chips.

The post How to Divide Poker Chips in a $20 Buy-In Home Game appeared first on Upswing Poker.