Why 6-Max 100bb? The Standard That Covers Your Home Game

It’s the second orbit of your Friday $1/$2 game, eight players squeezed around a table built for six, when your buddy Mike pulls up a range chart on his phone between hands – the grid that shows which starting hands to play from a given seat – and announces that Ace-Ten offsuit (two different suits) is a fold from where you’re sitting. Someone across the table isn’t having it: “That’s a six-handed chart. There are eight of us.” Mike doesn’t have an answer. Neither does anyone else, so the next hand gets dealt and the question gets dropped.

It’s a good question with a real answer. Nearly every chart, solver and training tool in poker, Poker Sense included, is built around one specific game: six players, each with 100 big blinds. This post is about why that game became the standard, where it stops, and how much of it survives the trip to a table with seven, eight or nine people around it. Most of it does, with a few exceptions we’ll name.

What “6-Max 100bb” Means

Six-max is a table with at most six seats. Going clockwise from the first player to act before the flop, they are Under the Gun (UTG), the Hijack (HJ), the Cutoff (CO), the Button (BTN), the Small Blind (SB) and the Big Blind (BB). If those names are new, our position guide walks through all six. The one-line version: the button acts last after the flop, the blinds put money in before seeing their cards, and the seats in between play looser the closer they sit to the button.

The big blind is the larger of the two forced bets that start every hand, and it’s poker’s unit of measurement: at $1/$2, one big blind is $2, so a 100 big blind stack, written 100bb, is $200. Put the two together and “6-max 100bb” names a complete game: six seats, $200 in front of every player. It’s the game online cash tables spread by default, the game the published charts assume, and the game the solvers were pointed at.

Why Six Seats Became the Standard

It’s where the decisions are. A table with nine players is a table where most people fold most of the time. From the first seat, with eight players still to act, a disciplined player opens around one hand in ten. Cut the table to six and every seat loosens up: a solid 6-max UTG opens roughly 15% of hands and the button opens 40% or more. More hands played per seat means more flops, more turns, more rivers, and more of the hard postflop decisions that separate winning players from break-even ones.

It’s what online cash is. When online poker rooms made six-handed tables their main cash product, the players who logged the most hands and did the most studying were all playing 6-max. Where the volume went, the strategy work followed.

It’s the game the solvers mapped. A solver needs starting ranges – a range is the whole set of hands a player could hold given the way the hand has been played so far – before it can compute anything, and the preflop ranges that got computed and published first were six-handed ones. The postflop tools inherited those ranges as their inputs. A decade on, “the solver says” almost always means “the solver, for a six-handed game, says.”

Why 100 Big Blinds

Stack depth is the other half of the name, and it matters because it decides how many streets of real betting a hand can contain.

The measuring stick is the stack-to-pot ratio, or SPR: the money left behind divided by the money in the middle. In a single-raised pot at 100bb – one raise, one call, everyone else out of the way – the pot on the flop is about five and a half big blinds with about ninety-seven and a half behind, an SPR near 18. That’s room for a bet on the flop, a bigger one on the turn and a genuine decision on the river with plenty of stack still to lose. In a 3-bet pot (a raise and a re-raise, the re-raise being the third bet of the hand counting the big blind as the first), the flop pot is around 24 big blinds against 88 behind, and normal-sized bets on three streets put the whole stack in. In a 4-bet pot, roughly 56 in the middle and 72 behind, a bet or two settles it. Our guide to pot types covers what each of those does to your hand; the point here is that at 100bb all three geometries are live, and every street of every one of them still holds a decision worth studying.

Shallower and deeper stacks are variants, not different games. Buy in for 40bb and it’s the same game with the ending moved closer: a 3-bet pot is already nearly an all-in decision. Buy in for 200bb and the ending moves further away. 100bb is the depth where the whole game is in play at once, which is why it makes the best classroom – and, not by coincidence, the usual maximum buy-in at an online cash table.

Your Nine-Handed Table Is a Six-Handed Table With Three Extra Seats

A nine-handed table has the same six seats a 6-max table does, plus three early ones in front of them. The names for the early seats vary from game to game (UTG, UTG+1 and UTG+2 is the common set, with the fourth seat called the Lojack, or LJ), and you don’t need to memorize any of them. What matters is counting seats from the button, because a seat’s distance from the button tells you how many players still have to act after you.

In a six-handed game, UTG sits three seats to the right of the button with five players behind. At nine seats, the player three to the right of the button is the Lojack, and the Lojack also has five players behind. So the Lojack is the 6-max UTG under a different name, and some six-handed players call it exactly that. The hijack is two seats to the right of the button at either table, the cutoff is one, and the blinds are the blinds. Six of your nine seats are the six-handed seats, with the same number of players behind them.

The three extra seats are where the difference lives, and they mostly express it by folding. When the first three seats fold – which, if they’re playing sensibly, is most of the time – the hand that’s left is a six-handed hand. Folded to the Lojack with five to act is a 6-max UTG spot. Folded to the hijack with four to act is a 6-max hijack spot. The chart Mike was reading is the right chart from six of your nine seats. In practice:

Take the chart seat-for-seat from the Lojack onward. Folded to you in the Lojack, hijack, cutoff, button or small blind: use the 6-max range for the seat with the same number of players behind you. (Folded to the big blind, there’s no decision: you win the blinds.) Facing a raise from one of those seats, the 6-max “facing an open” answer is your answer too, provided the raise is close to the size the chart assumes: two and a half big blinds, $5 at $1/$2. A home-game open to $12 or $15 is a different price against a different range, and the adjustment is to call less and fold more.

Do not carry the 6-max UTG range into the first three seats. From UTG at a nine-handed table there are eight players behind you, not five, and every extra player is another chance that someone woke up with a hand. The 6-max UTG range is the loosest you should be from those seats – a ceiling, not a template – and from the very first seat you want noticeably less than it, trimming from the bottom of the range up.

Respect early raises more than the chart does. The chart’s answers for facing a raise assume the raiser had a 6-max range. A nine-handed UTG raise comes from a tighter one, so when the 6-max answer against an open is a marginal call, the same hand against an open from one of the three extra seats is a fold.

One piece of fine print. When four people fold in front of you, the hands they folded were mostly weak ones, which leaves the unseen cards very slightly richer in Aces and Kings than a fresh deck. Players call this the bunching effect. It’s real, and it’s small enough that the six-handed answer is right to within a hair.

A Hand That Doesn’t Know How Many Seats Are at the Table

Let’s deal one out. Nine-handed, $1/$2, everyone close to $200, which is 100 big blinds. UTG, UTG+1, UTG+2 and the Lojack fold. You’re in the hijack with the Ace of hearts and the Queen of clubs, Ace-Queen offsuit. Four players still to act: cutoff, button, small blind, big blind.

A 6-max hijack has exactly one seat folded in front and exactly those four seats behind. Four folds at your table instead of one don’t change who’s left to act, how much is in the pot or how deep anyone is. This is a six-handed decision, and Ace-Queen is a comfortable raise from the hijack at either table.

You make it $5, two and a half big blinds. The cutoff, button and small blind fold, and the big blind, who already has $2 in, calls $3 more. The pot is $11: your $5, the big blind’s $5 and the small blind’s dead $1. Each of you has $195 behind. In big blinds, that’s a 5.5bb pot with 97.5bb back – the exact hijack-against-big-blind single-raised pot the solver studies, to the chip. (We’re treating the four early folds as telling you nothing, which, bunching aside, is what they tell you.)

The flop comes the Ace of spades, the Eight of diamonds and the Four of clubs: three different suits, so no flush draw is possible, and a spread of ranks that leaves only inside straight draws, the kind that need one exact rank to fill, four cards in the deck. You’ve flopped top pair – you’ve paired the Ace, the highest card on board – with a Queen kicker, the side card that breaks ties between two players holding the same pair. The big blind checks to you.

Your options are the ones the solver weighs: check, a small bet of about a third of the pot (a shade under $4, call it $4), or a bigger one of about three-quarters (about $8). Whichever you choose, and whatever the big blind does next, every decision from here to the river is one the solver answers for this pot, these two ranges and this flop: the check-raise you might face, the turn card, the river bet. How often to bet this hand, and at which size, is what you’d practice in the app; the point for today is that it’s the same answer at your table as at an online six-handed one. Not one of those maps has a column for how many seats the table had.

As for Mike’s Ace-Ten offsuit: it depends which seat, which was the answer all along. From the hijack onward, the chart’s answer is the answer. From one of the three extra seats, it’s a fold however the six-handed chart colors it.

Where the Standard Runs Out

The solver’s map is of one game, and after the flop it’s a heads-up map: one raiser against one caller. That isn’t a quirk of any particular tool. Solving pots with three or more players is enormously harder than solving heads-up ones, and nearly all solver work stops at two. So four situations that come up constantly in home games sit off the edge of the map, and for each you’re better served by a rule of thumb than by a chart drawn for a different spot.

Multiway pots. Three or more players see the flop. Every extra player is another range that might have connected, so a hand’s value depends far more on what it can beat at showdown and far less on what a bet might fold out. The rule: bet your strong hands for value, check most everything else, and bluff almost never. One pair, top pair included, shrinks with every extra player; draws to the best possible hand grow, because more players means more people to pay you off when it gets there.

Limped family pots. Limping is calling the big blind before the flop instead of raising, and a row of limpers is how a lot of home-game hands start. Facing that row, the solver’s options are fold, limp along or raise, and when it raises, it raises big: four big blinds plus one more for each limper, so three limpers means a raise to seven big blinds, $14 in a $1/$2 game. Once a limped pot goes to the flop, though, you’re off the map. The pot is small, nobody’s range holds the hands that usually star, and the junk hands are the dangerous ones; the limped-pot section of our pot types guide has the full picture. The rule: play for a small pot, bet a good hand for value without falling in love with it, and believe a raise.

Short stacks after a rebuy. Someone loses a stack and rebuys for $60, which is 30 big blinds, and the game against that player is now a 30bb game, because the stack that matters in any pot is the smaller one, called the effective stack. The standard assumes 100. The rule: the shallower the effective stack, the more the hand is decided before the flop. Against a short stack, hands that make one strong pair (big pairs, Ace-King, Ace-Queen) go up in value, and hands that need to hit something (small pairs, suited connectors) go down, since there’s no stack left to win when they get there. Below about 40 big blinds, treat a 3-bet pot as an all-in pot, because it nearly is.

Straddles. A straddle is a blind raise, usually to twice the big blind, posted by the player to the left of the big blind before the cards come out; the straddler then acts last before the flop, like a bigger big blind. The rule: treat the straddle as the big blind and recount everything in straddles. A $200 stack at $1/$2 with a $4 straddle is 50 straddles deep, the seat after the straddle is the new first to act, and you’re playing the shallower version of the game: the same shift as against a short stack, where hands that need to hit something lose value and hands that make one big pair gain it.

That game – six seats, 100 big blinds, from the first preflop decision through the river – is the one Poker Sense deals you, with instant GTO feedback on every decision. The free tier’s 20 hands and 3 coaching conversations a day cover preflop decisions from every seat and the flop in single-raised pots; 3-bet and 4-bet pots, the turn and river, and the facing-limpers spots come with the Basic plan at $10 a month.

The Bottom Line

Six-max at 100 big blinds is the standard because it’s the game with the most decisions per seat, the game online cash became, and the game the solvers were pointed at, at the one stack depth where every street of every pot type still has something to decide. The solver’s map of it is heads-up after the flop, one raiser against one caller, and nearly everything that calls itself a solver draws the same line. Your nine-handed game is that six-handed game with three extra seats bolted on the front: count seats from the button, use the chart seat-for-seat from the Lojack in, open tighter from the three early seats and give their raises more respect, and reach for a rule of thumb rather than a chart when the pot goes multiway, stays limped past the flop, meets a short stack or starts with a straddle. Mike’s chart was fine. He just needed to know which seat he was reading it for.