If you are not familiar with bad beat jackpots, allow me to explain. In most bricks and mortar casinos there’s a progressive jackpot that builds over time, called the bad beat jackpot. Poker rooms often take out a greenback or 2 out of each raked pot and put it into? The bad beat jackpot. The guidelines for hitting the jackpot are dissimilar in each casino. At some casinos you just need Aces full of Jacks or better beaten, while some casinos offer even harder beats like a 4 of a kind beaten.
In most card rooms, you may also be playing at a limit table. No limit games sometimes don’t qualify, as the jackpot would be hit much more often with players continually all in and seeing each card the board has to give.
When a bad beat occurs and is certified, everybody gets paid. The structure for a bad beat jackpot payout also varies from casino to casino. It’s not uncommon to see the losing hand receive 40 percent of the jackpot, the winning hand receive 25% of the jackpot, the remainder of the table split 15% of the jackpot, and the remainder of the poker room split the remaining twenty percent. As you can see, when a person hits a jackpot, there’s lots of room for everybody to celebrate. In the last 4 years I have played numerous hours of poker in casinos in Missouri, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma and had never experienced a bad beat jackpot till yesterday.
I headed up to Cherokee Casino, in West Siloam Springs, Oklahoma, with a pal of mine, to get a couple of hours of play in. While waiting for our seats to open, we sat down in reasonably loose $4 / $8 limit game.
In this poker room, $4 / $8 limit is the lowest limit game offered, so it feels very similar to playing $2 / $4 and $3 / $6, where having seven callers pre-flop on a raised hand is common and where Aces barely stand any chance. We had only been playing for about thirty minutes when it all went down.
I was sitting in seat nine, with a loose player sitting to my right, in seat eight. This player was twenty-three years of age and was also a dealer at the casino. (In the bigger casinos, customarily if you’re a dealer you aren’t permitted to play in games in your own card room, but this is not a rule at Cherokee Casino.). The player in seat eight was holding JJ and the player in seat five was holding QQ.
The bulk of this hand was heads up and the last board was:. Our table was only half listening because this pot did not appear terribly exciting. The player in seat eight, holding the JJ, turned up his jacks to show his quads and declared, “Can you beat this. The table awakened a tiny because a player was showing 4 Jacks. The player in seat five grinned massive and claimed, “Sure can. Only about 3 players at the table actually knew what this meant; it was bad beat jackpot time. After around one or two seconds of explaining the situation, everybody at the table, excepting the 2 first time players, knew what was taking place and the table exploded in cheers.
Players from all over the poker room were surrounding our table making an attempt to see what had happened. In fact, sometimes players don’t start entertaining and jumping around at a $4 / $8 limit table. The bad beat jackpot was up to slightly over $80,000. After around an hour of camera checking, card checking, paper work, and corroboration, the bad beat was confirmed with 4 Jacks losing to four Queens. The player next to me, with the four Jacks, won $32,000. The player across from me, with the four Queens, won $20,000. The other seven players, including my buddy and me, split $12,000, which ended up being about $1720 apiece. The rest of the poker room players ended up getting around $130 a head. The 2 first-time players at our table had not got any idea what was going on and the reason why they were being handed $1700 in notes. We made certain to tell them poker wasn’t always this simple. After playing for one or two more hours and never leaving our $4 / $8 seats, it was time to head home.