Run it twice,
explained for operators.

When every player left in a hand is all in, nobody can bet again. What remains is the deal: the turn and river, or the flop, turn and river if the money went in before the flop. Running it twice means dealing those remaining cards two separate times from the same deck, and awarding half the pot to the best hand on each board. Running it three times deals three boards, a third of the pot each.

The cards already on the table stay where they are. Only the streets still to come are repeated, each with its own burn card, and the cards used by the first run are not available to the second. A player can win both runs, lose both, or win one and lose one and take back half.

The habit started in live cash games, where high-stakes players used it to keep big all-in pots from swinging their bankroll too far on one card. Online rooms brought it to their cash tables over the last decade. It is a cash-game feature: in a tournament, chips are not money and a player who loses an all-in is usually out, so rooms generally keep it to their cash tables.

Each run is dealt from a deck that, before anyone sees a card, is as random as the single run would have been. So each run's chance of going to a given player is the same as the single run's chance, and that player's expected share of the pot is unchanged. A player who is 80% to win a 200-chip pot expects 160 chips whether the board is dealt once, twice or three times.

What changes is the spread. Dealt once, the 80% favourite takes all 200 chips four times in five and nothing the fifth time: a standard deviation of 80 chips. Dealt twice, each run is worth 100 chips, the most common result is the whole pot, and losing both runs is rare. The spread falls to about 57 chips. Dealt three times, it falls to about 46.

Those figures treat the runs as independent. They are not quite: the second run cannot use the cards the first one dealt, so a card that helped one player on the first board cannot help them again. Real figures differ a little from the table, but the direction is always the same — more runs, smaller swings, identical expectation.

Pots rarely divide evenly. A 201-chip pot run twice is 100.5 chips a run, and chips do not come in halves. A room needs a rule, applied the same way every time and written into its game rules: commonly the indivisible chips go one each to the earlier runs. Run twice, the first run is worth 101 chips and the second 100; run three times, a 200-chip pot is worth 67, 67 and 66.

Rake is the other decision. A room that rakes each run separately takes more from a pot that is run twice than from the same pot run once, which punishes players for choosing a feature that changes nothing else. When PokerStars brought run it twice to its real-money tables in 2012, it said it would not rake the pot twice. The usual rule now is to take the rake once, from the whole pot, before it is split among the runs.

Split pots within a run follow the game's ordinary rules. Two players who tie on one board share that run's share. In a hi/lo game, each run is settled high and low on its own, so one board can be scooped while the other is split.^[2]

With three or more players all in for different amounts, the money sits in a main pot and one or more side pots, each contested by a different set of players. Each contested pot is split among the runs on its own. A side pot two players contest is decided, run by run, between those two only; the main pot, run by run, among everyone eligible for it.

A pot only one player can win — the unmatched part of the biggest stack, say — is not contested, so there is nothing to run. It goes back to its owner, once.

More players also means fewer cards left. Nine players all in before the flop at Omaha hold 36 cards between them; one run with its burns needs eight more, and the 52-card deck has room for two runs but not three. A room must cap the runs at what the deck can still deal, and say so at the table.

Running it twice is normally by agreement: every player still in the hand must want it, and one refusal means the board is dealt once. The room has to say how agreement is asked for and what happens if a player does not answer — a player who has disconnected, or simply let the clock run down.

Rooms answer this differently. When PokerStars first offered it, both players had to have the feature switched on before the hand. At 888poker, the player who went all in first is asked, and the opponent then accepts or declines; it is offered in heads-up pots only. At GGPoker, players tick a box to run it up to three times, and the opponent must agree.

The safest default treats silence as a no. A player who has left the table, or whose connection has dropped, is never committed to a different deal from the one they sat down to.^[2][1][3]

Most rooms show each player's chance of winning at the all-in, and players expect it. The numbers have to be right and consistent: the same hand should show the same percentages every time it is replayed or reviewed.

They also have to be shown only when they reveal nothing. The server knows every hand, so it can compute everyone's equity at any time — but publishing a percentage while a hand is still face down would tell the table something about it. The rule is simple: equity appears only once the cards it is computed from are face up.

Run it twice has become a standard cash-game feature at the largest regulated rooms. The table below lists what each has published, with the date the source was written.

On PokerEnginePro, a table runs an all-in board once, two times or three times, either always or by agreement. When agreement is needed, the hand pauses before the first card still to come, and the table asks every seat still in the hand. One no ends the question at once and the board is dealt once. A seat that has not answered when the ten-second deadline passes has said no.

Each contested pot is split equally among the runs, the chips that do not divide going one each to the earlier runs. A pot nobody contests is not split. Rake is taken once, before the split, so a pot run twice pays exactly the rake it would have paid run once. Every hand still in is shown on every run, and each award in the hand's record names the run it came from, so the replay, the hand history and the ledger all tell the same story.

The number of runs never exceeds what the deck can still deal. Equity is exact with one or two cards to come and sampled otherwise — 20,000 boards by default, seeded so the same hand always shows the same numbers — and it appears only when the run-out has turned the cards face up.

How a table runs it is not a money setting, so the table's owner or the operator can change it from the next hand without the second approver a change of stakes at a running real-money table needs. Ready-made run-it-twice tables are among the room templates, opened in one step.

Each market's rule pack says whether running it more than once may be offered there at all, and the operator decides where it does offer it. The packs PokerEnginePro ships take a cautious line: the US state packs leave it switched off, and every pack is reviewed by the licensee's counsel before real money is played under it. Tables of games without a board — Stud, Razz, the draw games and Badugi — have nothing to run twice, and mixed-game tables, which change game every few hands, offer none of the table extras.

A table offers running it twice or all-in insurance, not both: insurance on a hand that may be run twice has no clean price.

Running it twice costs an operator nothing in rake if the rake is taken once, and it is popular with exactly the players who sit in the biggest pots. Its real costs are elsewhere: a few seconds per all-in hand while players answer, a slightly more complicated table for new players to read, and settlement code that has to get every odd chip and every side pot right, every time.

That last cost is where a platform earns its keep. PokerEnginePro checks that chips are conserved after every step of every hand, and its property tests deal 100,000 random hands run up to three times, with side pots, rake and odd chips, and find every chip accounted for. Each hand settles in its own pot account that ends at zero, which is the check an auditor makes.