Run It Twice, Anonymous Tables, Rabbit Hunting: Poker Table Features Explained for Casino Operators

Sit a casino team in on a poker product demo and, about ten minutes in, the vocabulary starts to sound like a magic act. Run it twice. Rabbit hunting. Straddle. Bomb pot. The poker people nod along. The casino people nod a little later, and somebody writes "ask about the rabbit" in the margin of their notes.

The gap is understandable. Most of these features were built by poker players for poker players, and nobody stopped to explain them to the people running the rest of the floor. It's worth closing, though. Every one of them is there for a commercial reason, and several map neatly onto ideas your team already works with, like volatility and progressive jackpots.

So here is the translation. First the three features operators ask us about most, then a fast tour of the rest of the table menu on the WePlay network. For each one we answer two questions: what does it do for the player, and what does it do for you?

Run It Twice: a volatility setting the players choose themselves

Sometimes two players are all in before the last card is dealt. At that point there is nothing left to decide. The remaining cards just have to come out. Run It Twice lets both players agree to deal those remaining cards twice, on two separate boards, with each board deciding half the pot. Win both and you take everything. Win one each and the pot is split.

If your team has ever compared slots by their volatility rating, you already understand this feature. Running it twice keeps the odds exactly where they were and shrinks the swings around them.

Take the most famous all-in in poker: pocket aces against pocket kings, all the chips in before the flop. Dealt once, the aces win about 81% of the time, so roughly one time in five the kings take the whole pot. Dealt twice, the aces lose the entire pot only about one time in 40, and around a third of the time the pot is split. Over the long run the aces collect the same 81% of the money either way, based on a WePlay simulation of 200,000 deals. The average stays put while the disasters get rarer.

Why do players ask for it? Mostly because nobody enjoys losing a week's bankroll on one card. The players who build the biggest pots tend to feel that sting the most, and Run It Twice lets them keep playing big without the whole session hanging on a single river. There's a second reason they're less likely to admit: two boards means two sweats on the same hand, and twice the drama is a perk in its own right.

The feature has a long online history. Carbon Poker and the Merge network offered it in 2008, Full Tilt Poker added it to Phil Ivey's room in October 2009, and PokerStars followed in October 2012.

Now the part that matters to an operator. When PokerStars launched the feature, it confirmed it would not "rake it twice". Rake is a percentage of the pot, and dealing the board twice doesn't create a second pot, so Run It Twice leaves your revenue per hand where it was. The difference shows up in how often a player goes broke on a single hand and closes the client. A player whose stack survives a cooler is still in the seat when the next hand is dealt, and every hand dealt is rake earned.

Anonymous tables: no names, no targets

At an anonymous table, players can't see each other's screen names. Each seat shows a generic label instead, and that label doesn't follow the player from one session to the next. Nobody can look across the lobby and find a particular opponent, and nobody can build a file on one.

To see why that matters, start with the biggest difference between poker and the rest of your floor. In a casino, the house edge is the same for every player at the table, whoever they are. In poker, players pick their opponents. A winning regular running tracking software, usually a HUD (heads-up display), can carry statistics on thousands of opponents, scan the lobby for the name with the loosest numbers, and take the seat to that player's left. Your newest depositor never agreed to be anyone's target. They just had a recognizable name.

Anonymous tables take away the name, and the file goes with it. Bodog made its whole network anonymous in November 2011. The stated aim was to cut off HUDs and data-mining sites and give players of every level "the fairest place to play". partypoker went after the same problem in June 2019: it banned HUDs and made every player choose a new alias "so that all third-party tool tracking is lost". The model Bodog started is still running: every cash table on Ignition is anonymous today.

Anonymity has a price, and any honest poker person will tell you what it is. Winning regulars hate it, for obvious reasons, and plenty of players miss the rivalries and reputations that come with a familiar name. Pokerfuse ran an editorial on Bodog's switch calling the result "sterile, mechanical, boring and ordinary". The heavier cost lands on the operator. Players who can't see names can't notice that the same two accounts keep turning up at their table together, so spotting collusion becomes entirely the operator's job.

That's why anonymous tables only make sense on a network with a security team watching every table. On WePlay that team runs a triple layer of AI detection, live human monitoring and expert audits, 24 hours a day, across the whole network. Anonymous tables run alongside standard named tables, so players who enjoy a rivalry can still have one.

Rabbit hunting: the replay after the whistle

Most poker hands end early. Somebody bets, everybody else folds, and the cards that were still to come stay face down in the deck. Rabbit hunting lets players reveal those cards anyway, once the hand is over. No chips move and the result stands. It simply shows what would have happened.

Your sportsbook team will recognise the instinct straight away. It's the replay of the goal that got ruled out, the one everybody watches three times even though the score won't change. Players use rabbit hunting to find out whether their fold was genius or a disaster, and the reveal gives the table chat something to argue about for the next few hands. A folded hand turns into a story, and stories are what bring people back to a table.

Online it costs the game nothing. The cards appear in a second and the next hand is dealt. That makes the most instructive rabbit hunting story the one where an operator tried to sell it. In January 2026 ClubWPT Gold started charging for it, around half a chip on an 11.5-chip pot in one example. It was the site's third paid version of a standard feature, after the time bank and hand reveal. Players were not impressed, and the frustration spilled onto social media. GGPoker, PokerStars, 888poker and partypoker all give rabbit hunting away free.

Live poker went the other direction. For its NOIR Series in North Cyprus this July, Merit Poker announced that every player in the $5,500 Main Event and the $7,500 High Roller would get one Rabbit Hunting Card, to be used once during the tournament. A feature players used to beg dealers for is now a perk handed out at a live high roller. Some features earn their keep by keeping the table talking, and charging for them turns a toy into a grievance.

The rest of the table menu, by the job each feature does

Those three get most of the questions, but they sit inside a longer list. Here is what the rest of the WePlay table menu does, grouped by its job at the table.

Features that put more money in the middle

A bomb pot is a hand where every player antes, the preflop betting round is skipped and the flop lands straight onto a big pot. A straddle is a voluntary extra blind posted before the cards are dealt, which doubles the stakes for that hand, and a re-straddle doubles them again. Additional antes do a quieter version of the same job. They put dead money in the middle, so every pot starts with something worth fighting for. All-in or Fold cuts poker down to one decision per hand: shove or fold.

What these share is that money goes in before anyone has made a hard decision, and that is the kind of poker casino players take to fastest. Big early pots reward nerve and a bit of luck more than months of study. We went deeper on bomb pots and All-in or Fold in our guide to the casino-friendly poker format mix.

Features that keep the game fair

IP and GPS restrictions stop players connecting from the same address or location from sitting at the same table, which shuts down the laziest form of collusion before it starts. Fast-fold tables (you'll see them called Zoom or Push depending on the client) move a player to a new table with fresh opponents the moment they fold, so there is no fixed seat for anyone to hunt. VIP and limited tables keep valued recreational players in protected games, away from the regulars who would otherwise come looking for them.

The jackpot and the social layer

Your slots team already knows the Bad Beat Jackpot, because it is a progressive. It pays out when a very strong hand still loses, and on WePlay it is funded by traffic from the whole network, so it grows faster than any single room's jackpot could. Your players are in it from their first hand.

Then there's the noise. Animated emojis and throwables let a player salute a hero call or fling something animated at the opponent who just rivered them. It sounds trivial until you remember that poker is a social game and online poker spent years stripping the social part out. A bit of table banter is a large part of why people choose to play against other humans rather than a machine.

You don't need to learn any of this to run it

Every feature on this list has settings behind it. Which tables are anonymous, and at which stakes. How often bomb pots fire. Whether straddles are allowed. Who qualifies for a protected table. Get those calls wrong and a poker room slowly tilts toward the regulars, usually without anyone on the casino side noticing until the recreational players have already gone.

On WePlay those decisions are made and tuned at network level by people who have spent their careers in poker, and they work from data across every operator on the network. You get the full menu from day one, under your own brand. Nobody on your team needs to know what a re-straddle is.

You may also have noticed that there is no house position anywhere on this list. Poker players play each other, and the operator earns rake on the pots they build. These features are aimed at how long recreational players stay and how much they enjoy that time, and every one of them is better at a full table. Filling those tables is the job of the shared player pool underneath, which is why the features and the network come as one package.

Poker table features: quick answers