Cash is the game people mean when they say they “play poker.” Blinds stay put. Stacks mean dollars. You buy in for 100bb or you buy in short and everyone at the table files you under prey. You can leave after one orbit. You can stay until the room closes. Nobody is paying you for folding king-queen on a bubble, and nobody is taking a bounty off your head. The only tax is the rake, and the rake does not care about your win-rate fantasy.
If you came here from a tournament, the first shock is how little the clock matters and how much the person two seats left matters. If you came here from a stream, the second shock is that most $1/$2 and 50NL is not a solver mirror. It is a tax problem with cards. Regulars at most meaningful stakes open close to solver frequencies. The 2010 “any two from the button” era is a campfire story. If your entire edge is “they fold too much to 3-bets,” you need a lineup that still does that. Game selection is the first street.
What you are actually sitting in
A cash table is a repeating no-limit Hold'em hand with a fixed small blind and big blind. No ante in a lot of live games; a big-blind ante in a lot of online games. Effective stack is the smaller of the two stacks in the pot, not the mountain in front of the guy who just sat down with 400bb. You should care about SPR, not about the tray.
The format’s only honest promise: you can quit. That is why bankroll math for cash is about bullets, not about “one more flight.” You are not trapped. If you feel trapped, that is not the format. That is you. Read the bankroll page before you decide your 12 buy-ins are “aggressive but principled.” They are neither. They are a way to go broke in a downswing that a competent winner is supposed to survive.
6-max versus full ring
Six-max is the online default and the live “must-move” reality when the room cannot fill nine. Full ring is nine-handed, sometimes eight, sometimes a live 10-max that should be illegal for how long you sit in the blinds. The difference is not vibes. It is how many hands you play and whose range you are up against when you open.
Under the gun at 9-max is a different job than under the gun at 6-max. At 9-max UTG you are opening a tight linear range because five players still act behind you plus the blinds. At 6-max UTG you are the hijack in disguise. If you take a 9-max UTG chart and sit it in a 6-max game you are folding the button from the cutoff. If you take a 6-max UTG chart and sit it in a 9-max game you are opening KJo into a firing squad. Position names lie when the table shrinks. Count the seats behind you.
Full ring is slower, more blinds-per-hour in the wrong direction, more dead money in theory, more nits in practice. The extra players do not automatically mean “more fish.” They often mean more people who waited two hours for a seat and now intend to fold 82o and pay off top pair. Your edge in full ring is usually patience plus value. Your edge in 6-max is steal frequency, 3-bet pots, and not treating the cutoff like a church. Live full ring still prints for people who can sit still. Online full ring is rarer than it was, and when you find it, check the rake before you congratulate yourself on finding a “softer” game. Soft and expensive can be the same table.
Zoom, fast-fold, the hamster wheel
Zoom — or whatever your client named fast-fold — is cash with the idle removed. You fold, you are at a new table. You do not orbit the same four regs for forty minutes. You do not wait for the station to finish a sandwich. You also do not get table selection in the old sense. The pool is the pool. The HUD, if you still live in a world with one, takes longer to become a fact instead of a rumor.
What Zoom is good for: volume, isolating your own leaks, grinding a stake where the regular tables are 4-handed and miserable. What Zoom is bad for: hunting a whale, using table flow, punishing one specific station for three hours. If your whole edge is “I play against Bob,” do not play Zoom. Bob is gone when you fold.
Zoom also taxes you in a way people undercount. More hands per hour means more rake per hour at the same bb/100. Volume is a multiplier. It multiplies leaks too.
Rake is the tax, not a product
Rake is the house’s cut of each pot, usually capped, often with a “no flop no drop” rule online, often taken live as a posted drop plus time plus a jackpot that nobody hits. It is not a membership. It is not a deal. It is not something this magazine is going to sell you a rebate for. It is a tax on the act of playing. If you cannot beat the tax, you are not a winning player at that stake. You are a donor with a HUD.
Heads-up pots at microstakes can be rake-killed. A 3-bet pot that is still under the cap can be rake-killed. Short-handed $2/$5 live with a time charge is a different tax than a raked $1/$3 with a $6 cap and a bad-beat jackpot on top. You should know the number. Not “around five bucks.” The number. Cap, drop, time, jackpot, the extra dollar they take because the room has a high-hand board. If you do not know the number you do not know your win rate. You know a story about your win rate.
You are not paying $5 every hand. You are paying it when a pot gets big enough to cap. Even so, a tight table that limps and caps small pots can take more from a winning player than a wild table that stacks off.
Online 50NL 6-max, 5% cap $3, 70 hands/hour × 6 tables: the drop is a job. If your win rate is 2bb/100 before drop, you might not have a job.
Rakeback as a product is how a generation of players justified games they could not beat. “I lose 2bb/100 but the deal makes me a winner.” That sentence built a lot of ruined rolls. If a room’s cashback is the only reason you are sitting, you are not sitting in a plus-EV game. You are sitting in a coupon. Play a game you can beat without the coupon. If the coupon exists, fine. It is not a strategy. It is not why this page exists.
The practical test: take your bb/100, convert it to dollars, subtract the rake you actually paid. If the leftover is a rounding error, move down. Ego does not cover a drop.
Thirty buy-ins is the floor
A cash roll is not “however much is in the account after rent.” A working number for standard 100bb no-limit, at a stake you have a real sample at, is thirty buy-ins. Not ten. Ten is how you turn a downswing into a stake change into a shot-taking problem into a deposit. Twenty is for people who already know their win rate and still get sweaty. Thirty lets a 40-buy-in downswing exist without taking you out of the game you can actually beat.
Move up with a shot, not with a feeling. A shot is a small, predefined number of buy-ins at the next stake, with a rule that sends you back down when they are gone. A feeling is “I ran good on Friday.” Friday does not pay Tuesday. Shot-taking is one or two bullets, not a lifestyle. If the roll is rent, stop. Live cash people love to say they do not need thirty because “I can always drive home.” You can. Your roll still shrinks. Distance to the casino is not a hedge. It is a gas bill.
Live versus online cash
Live cash is slower, looser, deeper, and ruder to your calendar. You see 25–30 hands an hour if the dealer is good and the table is not a talk show. People limp. People overcall. People pay off top pair because they drove here. The edge, if you have one, is usually patience, value sizing, and not turning into a bluff machine because you watched a $25/$50 clip at lunch. Live population folds too little on rivers and too much to 3-bets in some rooms, the reverse in others. There is no unified live theory. There is this table, tonight. The live versus online split is its own page because people keep trying to import Zoom c-bet frequencies into a 9-handed $1/$3 that limps twice an orbit.
Online cash is faster, tighter at the same nominal stake, and more likely to put you against someone who has actually looked at a solver. The rake is explicit. The sample is gettable. The fish still exist; they just do not sit in the same seat for four hours wearing a visor. Table selection still matters — seat a whale when the client lets you, leave when the table fills with regs, stop hero-calling because “online people bluff more.” Some of them do. Some of them are 22/18 and have never bluffed a river in 8,000 hands. Your HUD needs a sample. Your ego does not count as one.
Deep live (200bb+) is not the same game as 100bb Zoom. SPR 16 pots with suited connectors become playable. Set-mining math starts to work. Reverse implied odds for AJ on an ace-high wet board get teeth. If you take your 100bb 6-max dump-and-run style into a $5/$10 that is 350 effective, you will stack off TPTK and wonder why the room is “so much tougher.” It is not tougher. It is deeper. Depth is a rule change.
A cash hand, because formats without streets are slogans
$2/$5 live, 150bb effective, you open Queen-Queen UTG to $20, button cold-calls, big blind cold-calls. Flop T♠ 7♦ 2♣. Checked to you. This is not “I have an overpair, bet big for protection.” Three-way, dry board, you still have the best hand a lot — and you still get stacked by 77, TT, T7s if you insist on three streets at SPR 12. Bet small. Evaluate. The button is the player who can have the sets. The big blind is the player who can have 72s because live poker is a habitat. C-bet small, give up some turns, value the rivers that stay clean. Protection is a word people use when they mean “I am scared of cards I have not seen.”
Who this format is for
Cash is for people who want a skill game with a door. It is a bad format for anyone who needs a clock to stop them from depositing, and a bad format for anyone who treats every session as a referendum on their identity. You will lose tonight with an edge. You will win next week without one. The sample is the adult in the room. If you cannot sit still without a tournament structure, play tournaments. If you cannot handle the hamster wheel, do not play Zoom. The tax is not going to change for you. Your range can.
Leaks we still see in the wild
Open-limping UTG with “playable” hands. Short-buying 40bb then complaining about implied odds. Sitting in a 6-max Zoom pool of nits because the lobby said “full.” Paying a 5% uncapped drop at stakes your roll cannot stomach. Tilt-rebuying after a cooler as if the tax needed help.
When to deviate
Vs stations, value thinner and bluff less. Vs nits, steal more and give up rivers. Vs a live straddle-every-orbit table, recast your open sizes and your implied odds; you are not in a $2/$5 anymore. Leave when the recs leave. That is not cowardice. That is cash.
Cash will still be there tomorrow. That is the blessing and the trap. The table does not burst you. You have to walk away on purpose. Walking away is a skill. It is also the only cash-game fold that never shows up in a hand history, and it is the one that saves the most rolls.