Ante

Antes come in two flavours. The traditional kind has every player post a small amount — say $0.25 at a $1/$2 game — so each pot starts with dead money from the whole table. The big blind ante, now standard in tournaments, has one player post the total for everyone; it's faster and eliminates the eternal "who didn't ante?" conversation.

Dead money changes the maths of stealing, which is the whole point. At $1/$2 with a $0.25 ante nine-handed, there's $5.25 in the pot before the cards instead of $3. A raise to $7 now risks $7 to win $5.25 instead of $3 — your steal only needs to work about 57% of the time instead of 70%. Correct strategy loosens, especially from late position, and tournaments at the ante stage turn into constant small-scale robbery.

Antes also punish passivity on a schedule. Like the blinds, they're a per-orbit toll, and a tight player bleeds them without ever contesting the extra money they're helping to create. If you insist on playing few hands, the ante stage is exactly when that stops being viable.

Home cash games rarely use antes, but home tournaments do, and the big blind ante is the civilised choice — one player posts, nobody forgets, the dealer stops policing it. Whatever you choose, write it into the house rules with the amount and the level it starts, and don't let anyone invent an ante mid-game because the pots feel small. If the game wants bigger pots without antes, the straddle is the usual alternative. Watch the tournament regulars once antes kick in: the good ones start raising the blinds every orbit, and the passive ones fund the pot for them without ever fighting back.