Bad Beat Jackpot Tables: To Play or Not to Play

April 16, 2009

It’s difficult to resist the lure of the bad beat jackpot tables. After all, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars—or even close to a million dollars in pot money. If you are the “lucky” recipient of the bad beat, you will win 50% of the pot while 25% goes to the player who won the bad beat hand. The remaining percentage is then divided equally amongst the other players on the table (although usually, this computation is off because the poker room rakes off a percentage from the pot). Tempting? Most definitely. BUT is it worth it? Probably not.

Poker rooms have very strict rules on what hands can win the bad beat jackpot. Usually you need to lose with quad eights or better. A tough scenario on its own but to make it even harder, both players need to use both of their hole cards. Now how many times has this happened to you in real life?

It would really be difficult to compute the odds of winning a bad beat jackpot. However, some say that the odds of winning a bad beat jackpot in a live table (with more relaxed qualifications—meaning you don’t need quads…sometimes a full house would do), would be around one in 42,000 hands. Tough but this really isn’t too bad, right? Well, it is if you take into consideration that this number only works if 10 players are continuously dealt a hand and each and every hand sees the river.

Now the poker rooms will take a small amount of money from every pot on top of the rake for the bad beat jackpot. Assuming that the poker room gets around $1, this means that your table would have paid $40,000. This means that you will have to shell out around $4,000. How following the computation of the winnings, this means that the first placer will win $20,000. The player who gave him the bad beat will win $10,000. The other players will then split the remaining $10,000 which means they get $1,250 between them. So unless you are actually the two players involved in the hand, you end up losing money.

Naturally, I will end up hearing protests about this computation. After all, Bill (a friend of a friend of a friend) won a bad beat jackpot in a certain poker room after only five hands. There will always be exceptions to the rule but if you consider yourself a thinking player who likes playing the odds rather than against the odds, you may be better off leaving the Bad Beat Jackpot tables alone

Posted by The Metro under Metro Blogs.