Table stakes meaning: the minimum to compete

Where table stakes comes from

It starts at the poker table. A table stake is the money a player puts down at the start of a game, and under table stakes you can bet only what’s left of it. Nobody reaches for a wallet in the middle of a hand.

“Stake”, as money risked on a wager, dates from the 1530s. The office kept half of the poker rule: the stake is what it costs to sit down at all. The other half, where you can’t go back for more money, stayed at the card table. When the office sense first appeared is unknown. The earliest business use found so far is in a 2016 marketing book.

Table stakes meaning in business

Used honestly, the phrase sorts a list into two piles. Table stakes go in the first: ship them or lose. The second pile is where you compete. It’s the rare bit of corporate jargon that makes a list shorter.

• In software: single sign-on, a phone app, export to a spreadsheet.
• In hiring: the license, the degree, the years of experience an ad marks as required.
• In sales: a finished security questionnaire and one customer who’ll take a reference call.

The opposite of table stakes is a moat, an advantage rivals can’t copy. Table stakes are the things they already have.

When everything is table stakes

A manager who calls every item table stakes has stopped choosing. The label also skips the budget talk, because nobody has to argue for something that’s table stakes. Meeting table stakes keeps the needle from dropping. Work that has to move the needle needs a list of its own. Before you accept the label, ask which lost deal the item would have saved.

Table stakes at the office

A return to the office tests the office’s own table stakes. A desk, a keyboard, a cable that fits, a network port that works, a bin somebody empties. None of it makes anyone glad to be back. Each missing piece gets noticed by lunch on the first day.

Miss enough of them and the first week runs on workarounds. People bring cables from home, a box of spares turns up in the lobby, and the IT team gets a desk in a former broom cupboard. The welcome-back email mentions none of it.

Table stakes in a job ad

For a job hunter, the table stakes are a salary written as a number and a location that means what it says. “Competitive” sits with the other corporate buzzwords that take up more room than a figure would. A salary that won’t cover rent in the city the job requires fails before the first interview.

“Remote”, followed by the one city you must live in, is an office job, whatever the ad says about WFH. Ask for the number and the address before the next round.

A Slack thread about table stakes

#product-roadmap, Tuesday 2:14 pm

Priya: Dark mode is table stakes the minimum at this point, every competitor has it.

Tom: Agreed. So it goes in the release, and it stays off the launch slides.