The Complete Guide › Module 4: Side Pots & Multi-Way All-Ins

The Shortcut for Big Multi-Way All-Ins

True Poker Dealer · Module 4, Lesson 2

A fair warning before anything else: this is an advanced, optional method, not a replacement for building side pots the standard way. Don't reach for it until the cherry-picking method from the previous lesson is completely automatic. The only reason to learn it at all is that it's genuinely faster when six, eight, or nine players are all in at once — but it asks you to read hands correctly under pressure before any pot amount is locked in, and a misread costs real money.

Why this method exists

Building a full stack of side pots for a nine-way all-in, in order, before the board even finishes, takes real time — and every second of it happens while the whole table is watching and waiting. Experienced dealers sometimes skip straight to running the board and sort out who's owed what afterward instead. It's faster when it works. It is also genuinely riskier, which is exactly why it's taught last, not first.

Step one: get every chip out in the open

Before running a single additional card, have every all-in player push their entire stack forward so it's fully visible to the table. This isn't optional and it isn't just for show — a stack that stays tucked behind a player's cards is an opportunity for chips to quietly disappear. Say it plainly: “Everybody's all in, go ahead and push your stacks out for me.” Then tell the table what you're doing next, out loud, before you do it: you're going to run out the board, then award the pots afterward.

Step two: work inside-out from the best hand

Once the board is complete, find the single best hand at the table first — not the shortest stack. Count that player's exact stack, take that same amount from every other player still in the hand, and award them the full pot: their own stack-sized pot from everyone, plus anything already sitting in the middle that they're eligible for. That player and their cards are now done and out of the way.

Then move to the next-best hand among the players left, and repeat the exact same process with whatever remains on the table. Keep working inward — best hand to worst — until every player who was live at showdown has been paid or eliminated from contention. The hope going in is that the biggest stack also has the best hand, since that gives you the least additional math to do afterward; if the short stack turns out to have the winning hand instead, that's fine too — it just means you end up doing the same total amount of work you would have anyway, in a different order.

Two players splitting a board partway through this process works the same as a normal chop: once you identify that two remaining hands are tying for a pot, split that portion evenly between them before moving further inward.

Know exactly what you're trading for speed

The entire risk of this method is reading the hands correctly before any money has moved. With the standard cherry-picking method, every pot is already built and sized before showdown even starts — all that's left to do is read hands and push chips to the right spot. With the inside-out shortcut, you're doing the hand-reading and the pot-building at the same time, live, with every player watching. Get a read wrong and you've already moved real chips before catching it. If you're not entirely confident reading five or more hands at speed, stick with building the pots in order — it will never be the wrong choice, and nobody at a real table will fault you for taking the careful route.