How to Divide Poker Chips in a $20 Buy-In Home Game

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.