Posts Tagged ‘poker room’
Bad Beat
If you aren’t familiar with bad beat jackpots, let me explain. In most brick and mortar casinos there is a progressive jackpot that builds over time, called the bad beat jackpot. Poker rooms usually take out a dollar or two out of every raked pot and put it into? the bad beat jackpot.
The rules for hitting the jackpot are different in each casino. At some casinos you only need Aces full of Jacks or better beaten, while some casinos offer even harder beats such as a four of a kind beaten. In most card rooms, you must also be playing at a limit table. No limit games generally don’t qualify, as the jackpot would be hit much more frequently with players constantly all in and seeing every card the board has to offer. When a bad beat happens and is verified, everyone gets paid.
The structure for a bad beat jackpot payout also varies from casino to casino. It is common to see the losing hand receive 40% of the jackpot, the winning hand receive 25% of the jackpot, the rest of the table split 15% of the jackpot, and the rest of the poker room split the remaining 20%. As you can see, when someone hits a jackpot, there is plenty of room for everyone to celebrate.
In the last four years I’ve played countless hours of poker in casinos in Missouri, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma and had never experienced a bad beat jackpot until last night.
I headed up to Cherokee Casino, in West Siloam Springs, Oklahoma, with a buddy of mine, to get a few hours of play in. While waiting for our seats to open, we sat down in fairly loose $4/$8 limit game. In this poker room, $4/$8 limit is the lowest limit game offered, so it feels much like playing $2/$4 and $3/$6, where having 7 callers pre-flop on a raised hand is common and where Aces hardly stand a chance.
We had only been playing for about 30 minutes when it all went down. I was sitting in seat 9, with a loose player sitting to my right, in seat 8. This player was 23 years old and was also a dealer at the casino. (In the larger casinos, usually if you are a dealer you are not allowed to play in games in your own card room, but this isn’t a rule at Cherokee Casino.)
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