In the U.S., where can I play online poker for real money, and what are the minimum buy ins?

Try to google something about wether it's legal in your state or not please. PokerStars is a good site, also for play money. It's a good way to make youself higher a higher level poker player. The highest buyin-limits on play-money (200.000 chip sit & go's) are at a decent skill level, which at least represents $4 buyins. I suggest you start making profit at those playmoney games before going for the real deal.

You can still be a U.S. Citizen and play online poker legally and safe at http://www.rakebacksafe.com/us-poker-sites.html we only list legit rooms for the U.S. Intertops are a good choice giving 33% rakeback (rebate on the house fee) and a sign up bonus of 110% up to $600. They have been online since 1996 and have always accepted U.S. players and always will. 50 x the buy-in is OK but 100 x is much better. Still we all have to start somewhere.

Carbon Poker, I think is $20: http://poker-lobby.com/carbonpoker/ Other sites are pretty low, as well. And they all offer their own fast/free payout options.

At this time there is nowhere you can play poker for real money online in the US. A couple years ago there were tons of websites that were doing this. President Bush passed a law making it illegal for online websites to service US players. Basically it was all because people were making millions of dollars and it was all tax free. Because the government had no way of making money on this they just made it illegal for anyone to get money from it either. This bill was passed about 7 years ago, but even after the bill was passed all the online sites were still allowing US players to play for money. Then about 1-2 years ago the government cracked down and shut down all the websites that had US players playing for real money and froze all the accounts. But, recently President Obama reversed the decision on this bill. He said it is perfectly legal for US players to gamble with their own money online as long as the money would be taxed. Currently there are no websites that are fully functioning yet for real money US players. Once the government figures out a way to tax the money being won then these sites will be back on. I dont know an exact time of when this will happen but I think it should be sometime soon.