Bad Beat Jackpots Ease the Pain
Some online poker rooms and online sites offer “bad beat jackpots” which are either funded by the online poker room or included as part of the rake of each pot. Basically, a bad beat jackpot is meant to take the sting out losing with a strong hands, like quads, to an even stronger hand, like a straight flush.
Naturally, when a player holds quads, the assumption is the hand will win. But sometimes even quads get crushed. When these rare situations occur, the house often awards the bad bead jackpot to the losing hand. To qualify, both pocket cards in the losing hand have to be part of the complete hand.
Some bad beat jackpots can be very large when the house rakes a designated portion from each pot to be set aside for the jackpot. Since bad beats of this magnitude don’t happen very often, the jackpot continues to grow larger until an unlucky player with a terrific hand runs up against a lucky player with an even bigger monster. The biggest bad beat jackpot ever awarded was through Party Poker when $700,000 was paid out to a bad beat loser.
No one wants to be on the bitter end of spectacular bad beat, but if the poker online room pays a bad beat jackpot, the loser might get actually get lucky after all.