Run It Twice: Jeff Gross on His Biggest High-Stakes Pots (Won & Lost)
At the recently completed PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, PokerNews had a chance to catch up with Team PokerStars Pro Jeff Gross discuss a few different topics, including getting him to share some details from his own adventures in high-stakes cash games.
In between playing in those cash games and developing a following via his popular Twitch channel, Gross has amassed just over $3 million in live tournament winnings over the last decade.
In the video below, Gross tells our Sasha Salinger about the highest-stakes cash games in which he's played (ranging from $50/$100 NL up to $1K/$2K). He also describes both the biggest pot he ever won and the biggest he ever lost — both of which just happened to come in hands versus Bill Perkins.
In one case the money went in on the flop after both he and Perkins flopped sets, while in the other each made a full house by the river at which point all the chips went in the middle.
While there were no more community cards to be dealt in the second instance, in the hand in which the money went in on the flop, Gross explains, the players "ran it several times" with Perkins's better set remaining best each time to win him the entire pot.
In such instances, players in high-stakes cash games will often "run it twice" (or three or four times, even), which means to deal multiple runouts, each of which determines who wins a percentage of the pot. For example, when players "run it twice," each runout decides who wins 50 percent of the pot.
"This is a way to take down the variance," Gross points out. Instead of playing out the hand once for the whole pot, when "running it twice" players essentially play for two pots each of which is half the size.
Gross additionally talks about how he adjusts his approach and mindset when moving from high-stakes cash games to (relatively) low buy-in tournaments such as the side events at the PCA. Take a look:
