Cash Game Texas hold'em Cash game - Japan in yen (1 Viewer)

[MrApplesauce]

Hi,

Thinking about hosting cash game with Japanese currency. Buy in would be 1,000 yen (About USD $9 for the curious), and would be with a bunch of poker noobs (myself included). We would just be playing for fun and would want the games to last 2-4 hours. Probably start with Big blind 2 Little blind 1, increasing to 5/2, then 10/5, then probably 25/15 . . . ? there would probably be 5-8 players and I was thinking of letting people re-buy in once at most.

I was thinking about a starting break down of:

￥1 x 15
￥5 x 17
￥25 x 12
and then either
￥100 x 6
OR
￥100 x 1
￥500 x 1

Any thoughts from you poker pros?

Edit:

I'm also interested in hearing how many total chips you think I should have for this kind of game.

Thanks!

 

[Nex]

I think you are mixing up two formats.

When you play with cash, you usually don't raise the blinds progressively. You fix the blinds at one level and decide on minimum and maximum buy-in, usually relative to the blinds chosen (most common appears to be minimum 40 BB, maximum 100 BB - so for blinds of 1/2, your 1000 yen buy-in would be extremely large = 500 BB). People can rebuy at any time and as often as they like, provided they don't go over the maximum buy-in with the total amount of chips they have. When your couple of hours playing time is about to be over, you just announce "last orbit" and after the last hand is played everyone is cashed out the chips they have.

You only raise blinds progressively if you play tournament, i.e. everyone buys in for the same amount (goes to prize pool from which top X finishers are paid) and gets the same amount of chips, but important to note there is the chips have no direct monetary value. Rebuys are either not allowed here or only once or twice per player. You can gear a blind structure very well for a tournament to run for a certain amount of time.

For a cash game, your breakdown looks okay. I would go with a full barrel (20) of ones but 15 should do too. The amount of 5s could be increased too, but the breakdown should still somewhat work - unless your players are very nitty and barely ever make bets over 25 yen. Definitely go with 6x 100 though. if you take 1x100 and 1x500, making change for a 500 can get complicated. Remember to add additional higher-denom (25s and 100s) chips for rebuys.

 

[MrApplesauce]

I think you are mixing up two formats.

When you play with cash, you usually don't raise the blinds progressively. You fix the blinds at one level and decide on minimum and maximum buy-in, usually relative to the blinds chosen. People can rebuy at any time provided they don't go over the maximum buy-in with the total amount of chips they have. When your couple of hours playing time is about to be over, you just announce "last orbit" and after the last hand is played everyone is cashed out the chips they have.

You only raise blinds progressively if you play tournament, i.e. everyone buys in for the same amount (goes to prize pool from which top X finishers are paid) and gets the same amount of chips, but important to note there is the chips have no direct monetary value. You can gear a tournament structure very well for a tournament to run for a certain amount of time.

For a cash game, your breakdown looks okay. I would go with a full barrel (20) of ones but 15 should do too. The amount of 5s could be increased too, but the breakdown should still somewhat work - unless your players are very nitty and barely ever make bets over 25 yen. Definitely go with 6x 100 though. if you take 1x100 and 1x500, making change for a 500 can get complicated. Remember to add additional higher-denom (25s and 100s) chips for rebuys.

Thanks for the reply. What would you recommend for the Big/Little blind if we are all new to poker and wanted to make a night of it without too many buy ins? The idea would be to have one person go home with all / most of the winnings at the end of the night.

 

[Nex]

Problem is, when the stakes are too low for your players, the quality of play will suffer - so if you are new to poker, you won't learn much, or at least not learn anything useful for playing against solid players. If you play for cents when people have a monthly disposable income of hundreds of dollars, most just won't really care about the game. You can also see that on social poker websites where people play with play money - the quality of play there is atrocious compared to real-money sites. There has to be a risk of substantial loss involved for people to play seriously, although not too big of a risk to allow people to recover from a losing streak. If you decide to play cash, find out how much money your players are comfortable losing at a maximum for a single poker night, and then go with blinds that will allow everyone to buy in between three and five times with 100 BB each. I.e. if the limit is the 1000 yen you mentioned, you would calculate with at least three buy-ins of 300 yen each which should equate to 100 BB, so you would end up with blinds of 1/3.

However, if you want one person go walk away with most or even all of the money at the end, the tournament format will probably work better for you. If you want to go this route, you will want different chip denominations that make it easier and more efficient to play with. Remember, tournament chips do not have direct cash value (and you should never use chips that have been used in a tournament for a cash game later, for security). For tournament, it is common to have 25 as the lowest denomination, going up 100, 500, 1000, 5000 and sometimes even higher. We have some tournament directors on the forum that have personal experience with hosting tournaments, they can recommend you a good chip breakdown for a tournament set and also a good blind structure for a single table tournament that is supposed to run for 2-4 hours.

 

[Beakertwang]

Thanks for the reply. What would you recommend for the Big/Little blind if we are all new to poker and wanted to make a night of it without too many buy ins? The idea would be to have one person go home with all / most of the winnings at the end of the night.

We play 5¢/10¢ cash games. Buy in is $5-10, and rebuys are allowed. We have mostly college-age kids, and young families. It seems to be enough to make everyone take it fairly seriously, but only costs them the price of dinner and a movie. We play 3 hours or so.

If you're doing a cash game, I would suggest you start your blinds at 5y/10y and leave them there for the night.

On the other hand, tournaments can be a lot of fun, and you can start with larger denominations (usually 25/50) like you would in a casino, but you certainly can start with 1/2. I'd recommend starting with 200 big blinds, and increasing your blinds sort of like this:
1/2
1/3
2/4
3/6
4/8
6/12
8/16
*remove 1's
10/20
15/30
20/40
25/50
30/60
40/80
*remove 5's
50/100
75/150
100/200

You'll find lots of help here! Welcome to PCF!

 

[Nex]

5c/10c ($10 buyin) also feels to me like the lowest level where you can hope for halfway serious play. (But as said, that is relative to how much disposable income your players have.) If you get stacked, you do lose a meaningful amount of money, but it's not like that will get you broke, and it's also not that much that you are too fearful to bet/call all-in with something other than the nuts. That's the sweet spot you'd want to reach.

Implications of playing 5c/10c, or 5 yen/10 yen respectively: Players should be prepared to lose up to 3000 yen a night (equalling three 100 BB buyins) in the worst case.

I have to repeat however, for tournaments it's better to use different denominations. There is no reason to roll with a 1 as your lowest tournament chip other than the (maybe) hidden wish to save some money by using one chip set for both cash game and tournaments - which is no good idea. Someone could pocket a big tournament chip and later try to sneak it into the cash game in order to get it cashed out. So always use different sets for cash and tournament. And if you do that, the only reason why you would start with a 1 as lowest tournament chip is gone. Starting with 25 as lowest chip, you end up with nice round numbers for most bets that are easy to divide with mental arithmetic. (Good poker player never look at the absolute size of bets when they decide what to do - they always see a bet as percentage of the pot or of their stack.) Plus, your players will already be familiar with the numbers once they play tournaments at a real casino.

 

[Poker Zombie]

Poker should be played for stakes high enough to keep it interesting, but not so high it hurts.

That level, will depend on individuals in your group. For my group it's $20 tournaments. Even though I'm comfortable with much deeper stakes (as are a handful of others) , tournaments pay 1st enough to make the payout interesting for them to participate.

 

[yone]

I think tournaments are always good for beginners because you can only lose your initial buy-in. However, if your playing with a group of friends, I like cash games. In a tournament, when your out you can't come back in. You're going to have people sitting out, not being involved and thats not fun. Especially if its only 2 or 3 people left in the tournament and the game is going slow because no one is raising. In a cash game, people can take breaks, come back in and end when you want it to. You can keep the stakes low, like 5 yen for the small blind and 10 yen for the big blind. a 1000 yen is a good buy in amount (100 x the big blind). 3 x the big blind is a standard raise, but usually with smaller stakes I notice the raises are usually much higher. At least with the cash game, every hand you play in will have value along with the pride factor to keep the game competitive. I'm Japanese too, but I was born in New York. Have fun! It's a great game.

 

[MrApplesauce]

Thanks, you guys have given me a lot to think about. The more I read posts on the forums the more I can see how you guys end up with some many different sets! Looks like long term I might want to plan out 2 sets.