tl;dr A total bank of 5000 BB should safely cover 95% of your single table games, and 4000 BB should cover 90%
I've found this thread to be a great resource for deciding on chip set breakdowns.
I'm in the process of buying/augmenting a few cash chip sets. My parameters are 9 players max, single table only.
I wanted to see how the conventional wisdom of "3 buyins per player" stacked up against real world data.
I've been running an online .5/1 game for almost two years on Pokernow, and have saved the ledgers for each game. The ledgers give an exact breakdown of how much each player bought in for.
My game plays pretty loose, with a mix of aggressive and passive players. Our buyin rule is 250bb max or half the largest stack, whichever greater. Starting stacks and rebuys usually fall betw 150bb and 200bb.
Median number of players (throughout the night) is 7. 75% of the time we have 6+ players.
Here's the data for 189 games we played.
Percentage of games | Buyin per player (in BBs) |
---|
99.9% (max) | 986 |
99% | 726 |
95% | 511 |
90% | 451 |
75% | 378 |
50% | 312 |
Based on this data, for a 9 player full ring table, X bb should cover you Y% of the time:
- 8900 bb - 99.9%
- 6500 bb - 99%
- 4600 bb - 95%
- 4100 bb - 90%
- 3400 bb - 75%
So the takeaway is that a bank of 4500-5000 BB should be enough for 95% of your single table games, but if you want to be prepared for
everything, have a bank of 10,000 BB.
Of course, you should adjust up or down based on how your game plays. Also, online may play differently than IRL.