You know the moment. Everyone's picked a card, the host hits reveal, and you find out whether your team is roughly aligned or about to spend ten minutes arguing about whether a ticket is a 3 or a 5.
I run Kollabe, so I had a lot of those reveals to look at: 5,055,407 votes across 165,510 planning poker sessions. Anonymised, counted, no story-point opinions of my own attached.
The headline finding is almost boring, and that's what makes it interesting. The cards barely matter.
The most common estimate on the planet is 3. It shows up in about a quarter of all votes. Add 1, 2, 5 and 8 and you've covered roughly four out of five estimates. The giant Fibonacci cards, 34, 55, 89, almost never get touched. Teams think small.
Everyone defaults to Fibonacci. A third quietly rebuild it. Fibonacci is the deck you get when you open a room, so its 60% share is partly just inertia. The real tell is the runner-up: about 31% of sessions run a fully custom deck, more than pick any other preset. And the single most popular custom deck? 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Fibonacci with the zero and the big numbers chopped off. It's the most engineer thing imaginable. Keep the scale, delete the cards you never use.
The coffee card gets played more than 13. The little "I need a break" cup shows up in 4.3% of all votes, ahead of 13 and every t-shirt size. Someone plays it in roughly one round in eight, and 3,634 rounds officially ended on it. I have cast that card mid-session more than once, so no judgement here.
Teams agree on the first vote about 1 in 6 times. Only 16.6% of rounds come up unanimous on the reveal. The average round has more than two different numbers on the table. That gap isn't a failure of the process. It is the process.
The rest of the breakdown, with charts for decks, days of the week, integrations and consensus, is here: Planning Poker Statistics 2026.
A rule of thumb I've started repeating: if your reveals are always unanimous, you're not estimating, you're rubber-stamping. The disagreement is where the useful conversation lives. If it never happens, the cards are theatre.
Fair caveat: this is data from teams who chose Kollabe, so it leans toward people who like running quick, low-ceremony poker. But five million votes is enough that the shape holds. Small numbers dominate, and almost nobody wants a 55-point card.
If you want to run a round this week, Kollabe poker is free and needs no signup. Or open whatever you already use and check: how often does anyone actually pick a number above 13?
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