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.
