What is the "run it twice" feature?

When you are playing a cash game (also known as “ring game”) you have the possibility to enable in your game on Poker Now the “run it twice” feature. Below I explain what is the “run it twice” feature on Poker Now and how to use it.

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To use the “run it twice” feature you first will need to enable it on your game. To do so you need to go on “Options” > “Game”, check “Allow Run it Twice?” as “Yes” and then update the game.

Now, with the “run it twice” feature activated, Poker Now will place the flop, turn, and river cards twice when the betting round finishes before the river. Sounds confusing? Don’t worry, I will give you an example.

Let’s say that we have a table with the players: John, Alice, Joel, and Mark. In our example, Alice and Joel folded on the flop, but John went all-in and Mark called this all-in. Now the hand goes straight to showdown since no more betting rounds are possible.

In a normal game, we will see 3 cards for the flop, 1 for the turn, and 1 for the river. With the “run it twice” feature activated on your game on Poker Now, the players will be prompted if they want to “run it twice”, so they can choose between “yes” or “no”.

If all players that were prompted about run it twice choose “yes”, the game will normally place the 5 cards on the table, and then Poker Now will place more 5 cards on the table for “the second run”, this way, the players in the hand will try to form the best combination with their cards with the first 5 cards and another best combination with the second 5 cards. If your combination on the first run is the best on the table, you will gain half of the pot, and if you have the best hand on the second run, you will gain the second half of the pot.

When the players are prompted to run it twice after the flop was placed on the table, only the cards for the turn and river will be placed twice in the table, using the previous 3 cards of the flop to both runs.

But why you would run it twice, you may ask.

In simple terms, often when you go all-in with a good hand, someone will call and you end up on the wrong side of a bad beat losing the pot. This happens because of a thing called “variance”. To reduce the occurrence of these bad beats, the players can agree to have two chances to try to form a combination in exchange to split the pot.

Important: the run it twice feature is only available on the variants “No Limit Texas Hold’em” and “Pot Limit Omaha Hi”.