Lightning poker buy-ins, blinds, and bankroll basics

On Lightning Faucet, a poker buy-in is not an abstraction. One chip equals one satoshi, so when you sit down for 1,000 sats you have 1,000 chips in front of you, and when you stand up your stack goes straight back to your account balance at the same one to one rate. That single design choice is what makes every question on this page answerable with real numbers instead of analogies: your buy-in, your blinds, your bankroll and your withdrawal are all denominated in the same unit.

The practical answer, if you want it in one paragraph: our live cash tables run at 1/2, 5/10 and 25/50 sat blinds. Every one of them sets its minimum buy-in at exactly 50 big blinds, so that is 100 sats at 1/2, 500 sats at 5/10 and 2,500 sats at 25/50. The maximum is far deeper than the 100 big blind cap most poker rooms use. A reasonable starting bankroll is 20 to 30 buy-ins at the stake you want to play, which at 1/2 means roughly 4,000 to 6,000 sats. The rest of this article explains where those numbers come from, how topping up actually behaves at the table, and how to verify that the deck you were dealt was not chosen after the fact.

What a buy-in, a blind, and a bankroll mean at a sat-denominated table

A buy-in is the number of sats you convert into chips when you take a seat. It is debited from your account balance the moment you sit, tracked through our chip cage, and returned to your balance when you leave.

A blind is the forced bet posted before cards are dealt. The player to the dealer's left posts the small blind, the next player posts the big blind, and those two bets create something worth fighting over on every hand. A table described as "5/10" posts a 5 sat small blind and a 10 sat big blind.

A bankroll is the total pool of sats you are willing to expose to poker, held separately in your head from the stack currently on the table. The whole point of bankroll math is that no single session can end your ability to play the next one.

Why we quote stacks in big blinds, not sats

Experienced players describe a stack as "100 big blinds" rather than "1,000 sats" because the big blind is the unit that determines whether a decision is close. A 500 sat stack is enormous at 1/2 and nearly short at 25/50. Divide your chips by the big blind and you get a number that means the same thing at every table: under 40 big blinds you are playing a push-or-fold style game, around 100 you have room for a normal three street hand, and above 200 the deep-stack decisions on the turn and river start to dominate.

The live cash tables and their buy-in ranges

Our cash lobby runs a small ladder on purpose. A short list of tables that are actually populated beats a long list of empty ones.

Two things in that table are worth pausing on.

First, the minimum is 50 big blinds everywhere. Many rooms let you sit for 20 or even 10 big blinds, which turns the game into a series of preflop shoves. Starting everyone at 50 keeps postflop play alive, and it means the mental conversion is always the same: minimum buy-in times two equals a full 100 big blind stack.

Second, the maximum is deliberately deep. The 6-Max 5/10 table allows up to 25,000 sats, which is 2,500 big blinds. If you sit for the maximum against another maximum stack, you are playing a game where a single mistake on the river can cost more than a hundred buy-ins would at the minimum. That is a legitimate way to play, but it is not the default, and it is not where a new bankroll belongs.

Picking a number inside the range

Three buy-in sizes cover almost every situation:

• Minimum, 50 big blinds. The cheapest way to learn a table's rhythm. Your decisions simplify because most pots resolve by the turn.
• Standard, 100 big blinds. The size most poker strategy is written for. At 1/2 that is 200 sats, at 5/10 it is 1,000 sats, at 25/50 it is 5,000 sats.
• Deep, well above 100 big blinds. Only worth it when you genuinely prefer complex postflop play and your bankroll is sized against the larger number, because your effective stack is what you can lose in one hand.

The mistake we see most often in the funnel data is a player sitting for the table maximum on their first session because the field defaults to something large. If you are not sure, type the minimum times two.

How topping up actually works at the table

The mechanics here matter more than they sound, because they decide whether sats you spend turn into chips you can use.

Adding chips between hands

Between hands, adding chips is immediate. Your balance is debited, your stack goes up, and you are capped at the table maximum. If you request more than the ceiling allows, we clamp the request to what fits rather than rejecting it outright.

Adding chips during a live hand

If you are still live in the hand being played, your top-up is queued rather than applied. The sats are debited right away, and the chips land at the start of the next hand. This is not an arbitrary restriction. The hand engine rebuilds each seat from the snapshot taken when the hand started, so chips written into your stack mid-hand would be silently overwritten and you would have paid for nothing. Queueing it is what guarantees the sats you spend become chips you keep.

When that queued amount lands, it is re-checked against the table maximum, since your stack may have shrunk from betting in the meantime. Anything that does not fit under the ceiling is returned to your balance through the cage, not absorbed.

Auto top-up

Auto top-up, when you enable it, refills you to the table maximum before each deal. It is convenient for a long deep session and dangerous for a small bankroll, because it converts "I lost a stack" into "I bought another one" without asking. If you are still building, leave it off and rebuy deliberately.

Leaving is an instant cash out

There is no cash-out queue and no settlement delay. Leaving the table moves your remaining chips back to your account balance one for one. From there they are spendable anywhere on the site or withdrawable over Lightning.

Bankroll basics in sats

Bankroll rules are stated in buy-ins, never in sats. The sat figure is downstream of the stake you choose.

For cash games, the conventional range is 20 to 40 buy-ins at 100 big blinds. Applied to our ladder:

The shape of that table is the useful part. Each step up the ladder multiplies the bankroll requirement by five. A player who is comfortable at 1/2 with 6,000 sats does not become a 5/10 player by winning one big pot, they become a 5/10 player at 30,000 sats.

Moving down is the skill, not moving up

Set the trigger before you need it. A simple version: if your poker bankroll drops below 15 buy-ins for your current stake, drop to the stake below and rebuild. This is far easier to follow when it is written down in advance, because in the moment after losing a stack every player is convinced they are running bad rather than playing above their roll.

Keep the table stack and the bankroll separate

Because chips return to your balance the instant you leave, it is tempting to treat your whole account balance as your poker stack. Do not. Decide what portion of your balance is the poker bankroll, and let the rest sit for the other things you play. If you want the discipline enforced structurally, keep the poker portion small enough that a bad session is annoying rather than final.

Funding a bankroll without depositing

You do not need to deposit to build a first bankroll here, and that is the genuine difference between this and a poker room that gates you behind a card payment.

The faucet pays out to your account balance on a claim cycle, and the earn page collects the other ways to accumulate sats without funding an account. Those balances are the same sats you sit down with, which is why the 1/2 table exists at a 100 sat minimum: it is reachable from a balance built entirely out of claims.

If you would rather grow a small balance with something that resolves on a fixed schedule instead of hand by hand, our prediction markets settle against real-world outcomes like weather, mempool fees and mining difficulty, and the rest of the games lobby is sat-denominated in exactly the same way.

Deposits and withdrawals in sats

Funding and withdrawing both run over Lightning, and both are denominated in sats end to end. There is no conversion step, no fiat leg and no minimum denominated in a currency you were not thinking in.

To deposit, you request an invoice and pay it from any Lightning wallet. To withdraw, you scan an LNURL-withdraw QR code or tap the link, and your wallet fetches the invoice automatically. You never have to generate and paste an invoice by hand, which is the single most common misunderstanding new players bring with them from other sites.

Because settlement is near-instant in both directions, your poker bankroll does not have to live on the site. If you prefer, withdraw down to your working bankroll after a winning session and top up before the next one.

Verifying the shuffle: the part most rooms cannot show you

Buy-in and blind structure is arithmetic. The question underneath it is whether the deck is honest, and this is where we can show our work rather than assert it.

The commitment

Before a single card is dealt, each table publishes a server seed hash: the SHA-256 of a secret seed we have already generated and locked in. You can see that commitment in the table state at any time. Because the hash is published first, the seed behind it cannot be swapped later without the hash failing to match.

Your entropy

Any seated player can set the table's client seed. This is the important half. The deck order depends on both seeds, so a client seed you choose yourself means no one could have pre-selected a deck for the hands that follow, regardless of what they knew about the server seed.

The nonce

Each hand consumes the next nonce from the table counter. Same server seed, same client seed, different nonce, completely different deck. The nonce is what makes each hand independently verifiable rather than the whole session collapsing into one shuffle.

The reveal

Any seated player can trigger a reveal and rotate. That publishes the current server seed and immediately commits a fresh one. Once the old seed is public, every hand dealt under it can be recomputed from scratch:

combined = HMAC_SHA256(key = server_seed, message = client_seed + ":" + nonce)
deck     = fisher_yates(combined) applied to an ordered 52-card deck

Cards come off that shuffled deck in dealing order, with one burn card before each street. Check that SHA-256 of the revealed seed equals the hash that was published before the hand, then recompute the deck and compare it against the cards you actually saw. Our public poker verifier will pull up the commitment, client seed, nonce and revealed seed for a hand, and it runs the whole recomputation in your own browser with no login and no call back to us. The point is that you do not have to trust our recomputation either. You can do it yourself with a standard HMAC library in any language.

Table rules that quietly affect your stack

A few operational details are worth knowing before your first session, because each of them can cost chips if they surprise you.

• The action clock is 30 seconds. Let it expire and you fold, or check when checking is free. It is generous for a normal decision and not generous enough to walk away mid-hand.
• Sitting out too long returns you to the lobby. Sit out for more than two minutes and your seat is released so the table keeps dealing. Your chips are not lost, they go back to your balance, but you will have to take a new seat.
• One table at a time. You cannot be seated at two cash tables simultaneously. Leave one before joining the next.
• Short stacks still play every hand. Being below the table minimum after losing a pot does not force you out. You can play on with what you have or top up.

A first session that will not blow up your balance

1. Build a balance from the faucet and the earn surfaces, or deposit over Lightning.
2. Decide your poker bankroll as a fixed number of sats and write it down.
3. Divide by 30. If the answer is at least 200 sats, you can play 1/2.
4. Sit at the 1/2 table for 200 sats, which is 100 big blinds. Leave auto top-up off.
5. Set a client seed of your own choosing once you are seated.
6. Play. If you lose the stack, rebuy once and stop for the session if you lose that one too.
7. Before leaving, trigger a reveal and verify one hand you remember clearly.

That last step is not ceremony. Doing it once, by hand, is what converts "provably fair" from a marketing phrase into something you have personally confirmed.

Ready to sit down? The tables, the current blinds, and the live seat counts are on the poker lobby, and the buy-in slider will show you the exact minimum and maximum for whichever table you pick.