Pool glossary
Buy-in
What each player pays to enter.
What it means
The fixed amount every player puts in to join a tournament. Multiply it by the number of players and you have the pot, which is then paid out to the top finishers according to whatever split was agreed.
Where the word comes from
Poker vocabulary, adopted wholesale by bar tournaments.
How it sounds at a table
"What's the buy-in?" "Five, winner takes most of it."
What it means in a three-strikes night
Five or ten dollars covers almost every bar night in the country. The buy-in does two jobs beyond funding the prize: it makes people turn up on time, and it stops anyone wandering off at rack three. Collect all of it before the first break — chasing two people for five dollars each while twenty others wait is the single most common way one of these nights goes wrong.
The mistake people make
Letting someone play on the promise of paying later. It is never about the five dollars; it is that everyone else now knows the rule is optional.
Terms that come up alongside it
Written out rather than linked only, because looking up one term usually means you are standing at a table and do not want four more taps.
- Pot
- Two meanings: the prize money, and British for pocketing a ball. In American usage the pot is the total prize money — every buy-in added together.
- House cut
- The share of the pot the venue keeps. A percentage of the entry money retained by the bar, usually to cover table time, a prize, or the cost of running the night.
- Payout
- How the pot is divided between the top finishers. The split of prize money by finishing position.
- Three strikes
- The format: one shot a turn, three misses and you are out. A multi-player elimination format in which players take one shot each in a fixed rotation, lose a life for failing to pocket, and are eliminated at three.
Where it comes up
Buy-in matters most in three-strikes pool, where a single turn is one shot and the cost of getting something wrong is a life rather than a visit to the table. If you are learning the game, the guide to running a night puts most of this vocabulary in context, and the format pages show which games the term applies to and which it does not.