# table stakes (threshold)

*Ordinarily means:* the minimum required to participate in a game or competition

The wall that must be reached to stay in a game, which moves as others improve and the window of participation narrows.

- Computed level: L15 (depth in the emergence graph, not abstraction)
- Status: review  ·  Domain: game.competition  ·  Arena: competition.social

## Emergence
**Emerges from:** [wall](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-wall.range-end), [window](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-window.range), [narrow](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-narrow.spatial), [parameter](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-parameter.condition), [maintenance](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-maintenance.upkeep)

**Through:** interacting.social

**Novel properties:**
- emergent.window
- drift.aimless
- self-model.reflexive

## Examples
- 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. *(computing)*
- By requiring 99.999% uptime, AWS made multi-region redundancy table stakes for enterprise cloud services by 2015. *(engineering)*
- The 2020 U.S. presidential campaigns needed $1 billion to compete, making billion-dollar fundraising table stakes for viable contenders. *(economics)*

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*Canonical: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-table-stakes.threshold*  
*Structured data: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-table-stakes.threshold.json*  
*Every definition provably resolves to space, time, energy and pattern.*