Most players would love to win a share of a bad beat jackpot and players at the Lodge Card Club in Texas last week were poised to cash in. However, an extremely unfortunate river card left players hoping for a payout instead heading home empty handed.
A bad beat jackpot is a casino poker promotion where the house takes $1 out of each cash game pot to build a prize pool. The payout is triggered when a premium hand is beaten by an even bigger and unlikely hand.
'Baddest' Bad Beat
At the Lodge, which is owned by poker players Doug Polk, Andrew Neeme, and Brad Owen, the jackpot pays out 50% to the player with the “losing” hand, 25% to the player with the winning hand, and the remaining 25% to the other players in the poker room’s cash games.
Two Omaha players looked like they’d be cashing in on the jackpot last week when both players flopped straight flushes with the prize pool at almost $115,000. One player held 7♦8♦ on a flop of J♦9♦10♦ while the other player held the K♦Q♦.
Things looked great at this point, with the “loser” expected to take home $57,200 with the winning scoring $28,600, and the other 39 players in the room earning $3,900 each, according to PokerNews.
However, the A♦ on the river negated the bad beat jackpot payout entirely and left players pretty disappointed. The room has a rule that the winning hand must be hit on the flop, not the turn or river.
As Polk noted on Twitter: “With the ace on the river, the winning hand became a rivered royal flush, disqualifying the ‘flop only’ bad beat. Might be the worst one-outer in poker history.”
That ugly river turned out to be an epic bad beat indeed.
