Bad Beat Jackpot

"You can keep playing," said the dealer, "but there won't be any Bad Beat Jackpot."

"What's the point?" said the guy to my left.

At Greektown hitting the Bad Beat Jackpot requires losing with four-of-a-kind to a better four-of-a-kind or a straight flush. I played over a million hands of poker online last year, all of which are recorded in a database. When I did a search for hands that would have satisfied the Bat Beat, I found a grand total of zero. I do seem to remember once losing with quads versus quads though, so maybe I messed up one of the filters. In any case, when you're talking about live poker where you play 30 hands an hour, there's not much difference between zero in a million or one in a million. It's not going to happen.

Plus, it's not that much money. The Bad Beat is currently a little over $100,000. If I remember right, the loser gets half of that, the winner gets a quarter, and the rest is split up between the rest of the table. Don't get me wrong, it'd be nice, but we're not talking about set-you-up-for-life money.

Psychologically though the Bad Beat is brilliant. It takes one of the worst outcomes in poker (you make a really great hand but end up losing a huge pot) and makes it into one of the best. On an emotional level, to someone who doesn't understand the odds, this makes the whole idea of playing poker more appealing. Of course, the Jackpot is funded by money taken out of pots, not all of which gets paid back, so ultimately it's a losing proposition just like every other bet you make with the casino.

So okay, it's a cute promotion, a clever marketing idea, not that big of a deal, right? Nope. It's the single most discussed topic at the poker table and the primary driver of many players' decisions. If the table breaks down to less than five players, the cutoff for awarding the Jackpot, the majority of players will refuse to play for that reason. And many players assign too much value to starting hands, pocket pairs and suited connectors, that are capable of hitting the Bad Beat.