[beekeeper]

If you play cash NL at your home game for either of the following blind amounts, can you give me a guesstimate as to the average pot size?

$.25/$.50
$.50/$1

Or, if you do a spread limit, can you tell me about it?

I'd like to get a cash game going instead of tournaments and dealer choice games. The players at our game probably are willing to play with $50-$60 a night. I'm afraid at $.25/$.50, with a few of our players, a lot of the preflop raises will be in the $5 range because the stakes will seem low to these players. That would make me inclined to make the limits $.50/$1. But I'm worried the average size of the pot would mean that a $50-$60 budget wouldn't go very far.

[ericmalone]

Well, I guess 40BB would be a standard buy-in so a .50/1 would be a bit high. I say stick to .25/.50, if you get $5 pre-flop bumps, no problem for the rest of the table, they just wait for cards.

[legwand]

we usually play .50/1 or 1/2 and the pre flop raises are typical 3x-5x with one or two callers. pots can get steep, but usually that only happens a few times a night.

for some reason when i have played .25/.50 the game just becomes a shove fest. played in a few with a $60 buy in with reloads to stay at $60. typical raises pre flop are like $5, with multiple callers and typical best hands would be like a 94 suited..... i have no idea why these .25/.50 games get so out of hand. it seems that is really doesn't matter what people are holding, they feel the need to see flops. i dropped $250 one night. i played fine, got sucked out on a lot and had four such callers to my all in pre flop bet of $37 with AK suited. 2 5 off suit "had a feeling" and won the pot with a 2 on the river, the other 2 didn't show their cards. just one of those nights.

played in a .25/.50 game a few weeks ago, 6 handed. three people won money, 3 lost. the 3 that lost, lost $760, one guy only lost $15 of that. the other two were buddies and i think one guy had $200 on him, so the other guy spotted him the other money. sooooo $745 from two guys, in a .25/.50 game.........insane. last hand of the night included the guy spotting the other guy money, he had $14 left in front of him, went all in. i saw k10 suited and told him, "okay, i will donk one off with you, been a long night for you." made my flush on the turn, his pocket aces were no good. just one of those nights.

maybe try playing a .10/.20 cash game, then thats 3 buy ins. the guys can get used to cash games or comfortable with them and then decide if they want to raise the blinds. i have done that with a few buddies who wanted to try cash games, they seemed to like that a lot better then when we play .50/1 or 1/2.

[Nexttime]

All my opinion from here on out, your milage may vary. Cash games break out all the time at our local larger tournaments. Usually 20-80 people depending on the circumstances. It is going to depend on the stakes your players are used to playing at. I know from experience that we have tried playing .50/1NL after small tournaments $40-$60. The people who want to play smaller stakes are never the ones who show up at the local cash games. They also get chased down all the time by the people who do the math. Imagine betting .50 into a $3.00 pot and not understanding when the math says the villain has to call because he/she can take all the chips with the right draw and two cards to come.

Around here, most of the time, low stakes works for a hour or two. But usually as more people get knocked out the cash players join the game and the days of limping into the flop are gone. Or people get bored and start raising the cost to play a hand. The same people who play 5/5NL see the idea of raising pre-flop or playing Gus style as fun in a .50/1NL game. The more cash players understand how to play after the flop the less likely low limit NL is going to stay low limit after the flop.

Other solutions are multiple tables, one .50/$1 and one $2/$5 if you have enough people. One excellent result was making one table .25/.50 Limit and the other game a 5/5NL game.

So, average pot size for a .50/$1 game towards the start of the game is usually $5 to $20. Maybe $1-$2 if there is a decent raise preflop and no one is chasing or has anything decent to go to a flop with. A few hours into the game, $30-$50. After a half dozen reloads, it only goes up from there.

It's 3am and I am not sure if this is making sense, so I'll stop here.



.

[beekeeper]

Nextime, legwand, your replies are very helpful and they reinforce what I'm worried about. Someone on this site once told me that low stakes lead to shove fests and over betting, and that raising the stakes would lead to more "normal" play.

[reotexas]

I've recently played in a .50/1 game (with a $20 to $40 buyin) which everyone was playing with the standard 3x raise. Well because it was only a $1.50 to see a flop no one folded. Some players who play higher limits kept bumping the pre-flop raise until people started to fold. It took a raise of $8 pre-flop to do that. Well, once a person tried to re-raise and they went to $20. The hand got called down and the re-raiser had nothing. When everyone saw this everyone else started calling all the pre-flop raises and we had pots of $215 pre-flop.

Basically it won't matter what the limits are. The only thing which will matter is how people playing perceive the money. If they think its not much (what's one more dollar--its not even a cup of coffee at Starbucks) then you can expect the money to be flying in no matter what the limits. If they think it matters a bit then they will slow down (hey that $10 raise will cost me three Big Macs, I better fold).

[Harlequin011]

Your buy-in is going to affect pot size more than your limits.

There is a 1-3 game that I sit in that is a $200-$500 buy-in. In that game most people buy-in for the full $500. It doesn't play like the casino 1-3 game.

[abby99]

Average pot size has more to do with the players than the blinds. Take a look at the lobby of any high-traffic online poker site. For a given blinds level, the average pots usually vary considerably.

I've played spread-limit games in a casino. An example is $2-$6, with blinds of $1/$2. On each street the minimum bet is $2 and the max bet/raise is $6; actual bets can vary between those two amounts. The result is bigger pots than with fixed limits of $2/$4 (same blinds). The betting cap of $6 is not high enough to really protect a hand or to push somebody off a hand, a la NLHE. Thus, IMO, spread-limit plays more like limit than pot-limit or no-limit.

Some games have a cap on the amount a player can lose in a single hand; they do this sometimes at the Big Game, and there are online games with caps. I haven't played in one of these and can understand their appeal at high-stakes games but not at the stakes of my home game.

The OP mentions total buy-ins of $50-60 each for the evening, which suggests to me an initial buy-in of about $25 and one or maybe two reloads. If a normal max buy-in is 100 BB, that would suggest blinds of $0.10/$0.25 or so.

[BigBrando]

Last night we played a 6-person $0.25/$0.50 NL cash game with an initial $60 buy-in. Hopefully my recollection will help you a bit:

Pre-flop
Typically 3 players saw the flop with the avg. raise to $1.50. Average pot size came to around $5.

Flop
Average bet was $1.50-$2.50 into the pot - usually with 1 player folding. Average pot size after the round of betting came to $10.

Turn and River
Bet size varied. The average final pot size seem to be around $17 or so.

Conclusion
The $60 buy-in worked well with the $0.25/$0.50 blind structure. I saw no difference in raising habits when compared to our previous $40 and $50 buy-ins. It worked especially well for me as I finished up $165 for the night

Also, I don't like playing $0.50/$1 NL with a buy-in of less than $100. We tried a $60 buy-in once and players were pushing every hand.

[NoFear]

I play .50/$1 about once a month and the game goes about 8 hours long. Me like it.

8 player NL buy-in any amount. Most player buy-in 100xBB which IMO is a good stack to start.

Raised around $2.5/$3 only about avg. 2 player called. Avg. pots size $10

I would stick with .25/.50 for $60 buy-in (120xbb) where pots size around $5

Good luck.....