Buy-in

Buy-in refers to the amount of money you need to play in a specific tournament or cash game.

Poker buy-ins are calculated entirely differently for tournaments and cash games, so let’s look at these formats separately.

If you are playing MTTs, your buy-in will be fixed and expressed by mentioning the main amount that goes into the prize pool plus the additional fee that you pay for organizing the event. For example, if you are playing in a tournament with a buy-in of $1000+$150, this means that you have to pay $1150 in total. $1000 from that amount will go to the prize pool that will be distributed to the players based on their finishing position, while $150 will go to tournament organizers to cover their expenses.

It is worth mentioning that you will not be playing with that money directly but will get a predetermined amount of poker chips that won’t have any monetary value. You can’t exchange them for money whenever you want, and you have to play till you lose it all or win the event.

Tournament buy-ins are fixed, and you can’t choose how much you want to pay to join. In the previous example, you either way $1150 and start in the event, or you can’t participate at all.

On the other hand, cash games work entirely differently. For example, in a game with $1/$2 blinds, the minimum buy-in can be as low as $40 and will usually go to $200 or even be unlimited in some cases. As you see, instead of having a fixed buy-in, as in tournaments, you can actually pick how much you want to invest when starting the game.

On top of that, your chips will have monetary value, and you can leave the game whenever you want, meaning that you can stand up and exchange the chips for real money at any point in your session.