Need advice for a micro stakes home game

[Hedge Henderson]

It really depends on your players and how long you plan to play. Our game started with $0.05 ante and $0.05-$0.25 spread limit, and five bucks usually lasted the sober players 5-6 hours. Of course, in those days, a bet of a quarter usually meant you had the goods. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

You don't mention whether you want this to become a regular thing. If you do, and unless your players abolutely won't bother to understand limit poker, I'd recommend starting with it. Once they get comfortable with fixed limits, then you can mix it up.

The players in our game who were there early on have no problem switching between limit and NL. Those who came in after we started favoring NL constantly complain about limit. One player has even referred to limit as like "being in jail".

For a 4-5 hour game with a small number of re-buys, I suggest $0.05/$0.10 blinds for NL and perhaps $0.10/$0.20 blinds for a $0.20/$0.40 limit game.

In the 3 years since we've introduced NL play, the average pot size is about the same for limit and NL when limit blinds are close to 2x the NL blinds. Naturally, our big pots are always larger in NL, but they're offset by the fact that we see the turn and river much more often in limit. YMMV

You've been here a while so I'm sure you know, but I can't stress enough that you want to have rules in place before play begins. Our first six months we only made rules when problems arose. There was a lot of playing time lost to arguments until I started looking online to see how things were supposed to be.