{
  "id": "table-stakes.threshold",
  "term": "table stakes",
  "sense": "threshold",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 15,
  "arena": "competition.social",
  "domain": "game.competition",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "The wall that must be reached to stay in a game, which moves as others improve and the window of participation narrows.",
  "folk_gloss": "the minimum required to participate in a game or competition",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "wall.range-end",
      "window.range",
      "narrow.spatial",
      "parameter.condition",
      "maintenance.upkeep"
    ],
    "interaction": "interacting.social",
    "novel_properties": [
      "emergent.window",
      "drift.aimless",
      "self-model.reflexive"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "NVIDIA's A100 GPU became table stakes for AI training by 2022, forcing competitors to match its 40GB HBM2e memory and 624 GB/s bandwidth.",
      "domain": "computing"
    },
    {
      "text": "By requiring 99.999% uptime, AWS made multi-region redundancy table stakes for enterprise cloud services by 2015.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "The 2020 U.S. presidential campaigns needed $1 billion to compete, making billion-dollar fundraising table stakes for viable contenders.",
      "domain": "economics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "table stakes"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "phrases:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.7,
    "sources": [
      "folk phrase — the moving wall"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-table-stakes.threshold"
}