Comment by globular-toast
8 hours ago
In my experience poker completely falls apart when it's not for real money. It just doesn't seem like a very good game in the sense that people don't try to win unless there's some external benefit to winning. It sucks to play with people who don't care.
I run home games with 5c/10c blinds (5$ buy in). Keeps element of real money, keeps things very casual, winning players usually leaves with ~20$. Have food etc, costs losing players less than it'd cost to go out for a sandwich
Maybe I and my friends are overly competitive at board games, but not tying to win was not a problem for us.
Though poker and similar games were only tiny part of our games.
(except some cases where player was utterly doomed and checked out)