Bad beat jackpots have become a fading promotion for online poker rooms. There was a time when these were available at some of the largest sites. Jackpot tables would take an additional $.50 in rake that would go towards a progressive where the house would distribute about 90 percent of the money when it was hit. The rest would be kept as an admin fee.
Sites that have abandoned bad beat jackpots over the years include Party Poker, Cereus, Merge Gaming and Winning Poker Network. IPN is the only online poker site that still offers these traditional bad beat jackpot tables and it is closing in a few months, according to Pokerfuse Pro.
MPN restructured its bad beat jackpot promotion. Players that wish to opt in without may pay $.02 per hand without forcing these players to migrate to specific jackpot tables.
Brick and Mortar Bad Beat Jackpots Still Exist
While bad beat jackpots have become a thing of the past for online poker sites, they are still common at live poker rooms. These jackpots are usually tied to a $1 promotional rake that is taken from any pot of $20 or more. Smaller jackpots will release when a player loses aces full of faces or better. Some jackpots that grow large require hands as high as quad jacks to lose. These larger jackpots are where the bigger problem lies.
These large bad beat jackpots can grow well into six figured before hitting. All of that money comes from players. Some of the $1 promotional rake is held in a reserve jackpot. That means the house may be holding $250,000 or more at any given time for a jackpot that will benefit only a few players. A poker room that takes all of this money out of the poker economy, even if temporarily, is bad for the local poker ecology.
After the Jackpot Hits
There is a different problem after a jackpot hits in a live poker room. The table where the bad beat was dealt is paused immediately. The casino must check the cards and review the surveillance tape from the hand before paying players. If the jackpot was large enough, the players from that table will call it a night. The regulars may even take a few days off to celebrate. A promotion that pays table share across the poker room or city may kill the action for the night.
The players that take home the largest portion of the jackpot will likely never reintroduce that money back into the system. That cash can be removed from the poker economy forever.
Caesars’ MegaBeat
One of the best known bad beat jackpots in recent years was the MegaBeat at Las Vegas poker rooms operated by Caesars Entertainment. The progressive jackpot would start at $200,000 and a losing qualifier of quad aces. The qualifying hand would go down as the jackpot grew.
The player that lost the hand would receive 20% of the jackpot. The winner of the hand would receive 10%. All players seated in a cash game at any Las Vegas Caesars Entertainment poker room when the jackpot was hit would receive a portion of the table share, which equaled 70% of the total MegaBeat progressive jackpot.
Caesars Entertainment dropped the MegaBeat at the end of 2013. It returned shortly to give away the remaining portion of the prize pool.
Station Casinos Jumbo Hold’em Jackpot
Station Casinos operates a similar citywide progressive bad beat jackpot in the locals’ market. The qualifying hand goes down as the progressive goes up. This may have been the poker promotion Caesars tried to compete against.
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