All-in insurance,
priced, booked and switched per market.

In a player-against-player game, the room normally takes rake and stays out of the result. Insurance changes that for one hand. When players are all in and no more betting is possible, the house offers to take on some of the risk of the cards still to come, for a price.

Insurance is the older form, from live games. The favourite pays a premium; if the favourite then loses the pot, the house pays them. The hand plays out as normal between the players, and the insurance is a separate bet between the favourite and the house.

Equity cash-out is the form most large online rooms use. The player takes their share of the pot by equity, less a fee, and leaves the hand. The house then takes their place: if the cards would have won the pot for the player who cashed out, the house keeps it; if they lose, the opponent is paid as usual. For the player the result is the same — a guaranteed amount instead of a gamble — but the money moves differently, and that matters for the books.

PokerStars tested All-In Cash Out in 2019: an all-in player could take their equity less an administrative fee of 1% of that equity, and if the opponent played on, the rest of the hand was played against PokerStars. GGPoker launched insurance in 2020 with conditions on outs and pot size, and now offers EV Cashout. Playtech's iPoker network added All-in Cash Out in March 2024, at Hold'em cash tables marked for it. partypoker's All-in Cashout runs in the UK and other regulated markets, and cannot be combined with running it twice.

The fair price of insurance is simple. If the favourite is 80% to win a 1,000-chip pot, they are 20% to lose it, and cover for the whole pot is worth 20% of 1,000: 200 chips. At that price, the house breaks even over many hands. The operator's margin sits on top: at 10%, the premium is 220 chips.

Cash-out works the same way from the other side. The 80% favourite's equity in the same pot is 800 chips; a 1% fee on equity leaves 792. The house gives up 792 for a seat that is worth 800 on average, so it earns the fee.

Two details matter in practice. Prices must be rounded the same way every time — up to the chip, so the house never undercharges by a fraction — and computed in decimal rather than binary floating point, where a premium of exactly 132 can come out a hair over and round to 133. And an offer whose premium would not be smaller than the pot it covers is no offer at all, so it should not be made.

Insurance has a clean price only when it is clear who stands to lose what. That is why rooms keep it to heads-up pots: with three hands in, a player may lose the main pot and win a side pot, and the question of which pot is at stake for whom has no single answer.

It is also for the favourite. An underdog has more to gain than to lose from the cards to come; cover against losing would cost more than most of the pot. And it needs a pot that can actually be lost: if a tie is likely, the insurer must say whether a split counts as a loss. A clear rule is that it does not — the cover pays only when the insured player wins nothing.

Hi/lo games are the hardest case. A hand that loses the high half and keeps the low half has lost half the pot and won half, and cover that pays only on winning nothing is worth little, while cover for half the pot needs a second price. Games with no board — Stud, Razz, the draw games — have no run-out to price in the same way.

Poker is a peer-to-peer game: the operator provides the table and takes rake but is not a party to the result. GLI-19, Gaming Laboratories International's standard for online gaming systems, describes peer-to-peer sessions in exactly those terms — the operator usually does not take part, and may take a rake, commission or fee. Insurance and cash-out make the house a counterparty to a player for part of a hand, which is closer to a house-banked game than to poker.

Some regulators accept that: rooms run cash-out in Great Britain and Ontario. Others may require it to be approved as a game of its own, reported separately, or not offered at all. The answer depends on the licence and the game rules the operator has filed, and this is general information, not legal advice.

PokerEnginePro's market rule packs therefore take a cautious default. The packs for Great Britain, Malta, Ontario, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and the US states ship with insurance switched off; the licensee's counsel reviews every pack before real money is played under it, and can switch it on where the licence allows. Where it is offered, the insurance result is part of the gross gaming revenue the regulator reports count.^[7][5][6]

At a table where the operator offers insurance, the table holds every all-in run-out before the next card. When two hands are in and the cards are face up, the favourite is offered the contested pot at their chance of losing it, plus the operator's margin, rounded up to the chip. The offer is shown to the favourite alone; the outcome is shown to the table.

The premium comes from the player's wallet, not their stack. The insured player is usually all in, and a premium taken from the table would change the hand. The wallet pays from its most restricted balance first, the same way a buy-in does; a wallet that cannot pay is told so, and the offer stands.

The premium and any payout are their own ledger transactions, against the house's insurance account — never part of the hand. The pot, the rake and each player's share of the rake are exactly what they would have been without insurance. If the insured player wins nothing, they are paid the pot after the hand settles.

If a hand cannot finish — its server lost mid-hand — the hand is voided and the stakes returned, and the ledger finds the hand's premium and returns that too, recording that it did.

Insurance is switched off until the operator offers it, with its margin between 0% and 50%, from the back office's settings, and every change is audited. On top of that, each table has its own switch. Because insurance is money, switching it at a running real-money table needs a second approver.

An insured table runs its board once. Insurance on a hand that may be run twice has no clean price, so a table offers one or the other. Hi/lo games are not insured, nor are games with no board, nor are mixed-game tables.

Insurance earns the margin on every premium, on average. It does not earn it every hand: the house's insurance account pays out whenever an insured favourite loses, and over a short period it can run below zero. PokerEnginePro lets it, deliberately — it is the float the product needs — and the nightly reconciliation still balances to the chip.

The other effect is on players. A player who takes insurance pays the margin every time, so over many hands it costs them; what they buy is a smaller swing on the hands they remember. The case for offering it is the casual player who would rather lock in a win than sweat the river — the margin itself is small.