How many big blinds do you really need? The short answer: sixty; the long one is called chip utility, and it is how you measure the extent to which your stack supports the skills you have. Here you will find the table that defines it and, above all, the reasoning behind it.
- How many big blinds you actually need
- Turbo or slow: the structure decides how long skills last
- Every extra chip unlocks a skill
- The six levels of chip utility
- Why the threshold sits at 60 big blinds — and the limits of numbers
How many big blinds you actually need
Let’s start with the principle that holds everything else together: it is the size of the stack that determines the practical application of skills. However skilled you may be, nothing will be possible if the chips at your disposal are not enough to support the action you have identified. Skill alone is not sufficient: you need the raw material to play it.
This is why the question “how many big blinds do I need” is not an idle one. The threshold indicated is sixty big blinds: it is the minimum stack for facing every phase of the hand without being forced all-in before the river. Below that level the chips run out sooner, and with them the possibility of deciding. The rest of this article explains where that number comes from.
Turbo or slow: the structure decides how long skills last
There is, however, one variable no table can fix: time. Every tournament has a very different duration for its blind levels, from the fastest formats — the so-called turbo and hyper turbo — to those properly called slow. The number of big blinds in your stack, on its own, says nothing unless you know how quickly that number is bound to fall.
Every player has always had a more or less conscious sense of the difference between a fast event and a slow one. The point is that nobody had ever devised strategies as a function of that difference, treating it as a design variable rather than a feeling. It is the contribution that makes this line of study relevant to our argument: the faster the blinds rise, the more quickly the stack slips below the useful threshold, and the narrower the window in which skills can still be played.
Every extra chip unlocks a skill
For a long time tournament strategy leaned on the concept of the inverse value of chips, formulated in the literature of Sklansky and Malmuth: every chip won would be worth less than those already held. Arnold Snyder, in The Poker Tournament Formula II (2008), considers this thesis entirely wrong, and the reason is concrete: every chip added to your stack makes it possible to unlock those skills that need strong chip support in order to be practised.
In short: the more chips in the stack, the greater the strategic opportunities. It is not a matter of accounting value, but of possibility. And it is the same reason why, in a tournament, it makes sense to build your actions around your opponent’s stack rather than the pot of the moment.
The six levels of chip utility
From this premise Snyder derives the concept of chip utility: the competitiveness of your stack compared with those of your opponents. The value of utility is directly proportional to the skills you are able to express, and in his work the author translates it into a grid that classifies every stack according to its size.
There are six levels. Below fifteen big blinds you have no utility; between fifteen and thirty utility is low; between thirty and sixty it becomes moderate; between sixty and one hundred you enter competitive utility; beyond one hundred it is called full utility; and you reach dominant utility when, above one hundred big blinds, you also hold four times the average stack at the table. A corollary applies as well: the moment you acquire utility you take it away from your opponent, and vice versa.
Why the threshold sits at 60 big blinds — and the limits of numbers
The competitive band starts at sixty big blinds, and it is not an arbitrary number. It is the point at which the stack becomes minimally sufficient to sustain every skill through to the river. Below it, an action set up to win the opponent’s stack inevitably commits all your chips well before the last card — and in an all-in every skill is cancelled out. It is also why the weight of chance depends on the stack you enter the spot with.
Snyder himself, however, sounds a warning: there is no simple way to calculate utility, because much depends on the real qualities of the individual player, and even with many big blinds available your effective utility remains tied to your opponent’s stack and skills. It is a subjective assessment and, as he often repeats, “a poker tournament is based more on emotions and perceptions than on numbers”.
Having acknowledged this limit, the choice made by the author of the study is clear-cut: to adopt sixty per cent utility as the minimum basis of his own model, so that it stays uniform across all phases and guarantees the dominance of skills through to the final execution of the hand.
There is a difference worth noting, and it is where we will pick up next. Chips are always available in the same way for the whole duration of the hand: the stack will fall as the action develops, but the initial strategies are built on the one you entered the spot with. Information, by contrast, is not there from the start: it arrives little by little, one phase after another. It is on this second quantity that the other half of the Skill Poker Index rests.
In the next article we will see what exactly is meant by information, and why a precise definition is what turns it into a measurable quantity.
