Bad Beat Jackpot
Bad beat jackpot is a prize award paid to a player when losing a hand which is mathematically a clear favorite to win a showdown but nevertheless gets beat and loses the pot.
Bad beat jackpots is a marketing advantage for poker rooms which offers jackpots, since not all of them do, and apart from encouraging to more aggressive play the purpose of a bad beat jackpot is to enhance the customer relations by softening the psychological blow.
As previously mentioned jackpots are not offered in all poker games or card rooms but those that do have all different requirements of how to qualify for the jackpot and how strong the losing hand must be.
In most poker rooms the losing bad beat hand has to contain minimum for-of-a-kind for the jackpot to be paid out and often there are additional requirements such as in Texas Holdem were both hole cards must be included in the winning and losing bad beat jackpot hand or when the requirements are full houses, both hole cards must be used to make the three-of-a-kind in the full house.
You can read more about the specific rules, requirements, collection, payout percentages and amounts for the jackpot in each bad beat poker room, as you will find listed on the right hand side on this site.
Bad beat jackpots are progressive which means that a small extra rake is taken, in addition to the regular rake, to fund the jackpot. If a jackpot is won it is usually shared amongst the players sitting down at that particular table were the jackpot hit, were the largest share paid to the player with the losing hand followed by the winning hand and all other players sharing the remaining part.
In some poker rooms players playing the same blind structure and game format, as the table were the bad beat jackpot was won, also gets a small share of the jackpot. Two of these poker rooms are Ub.com and Absolute Poker and if you decide to play at these rooms when the jackpot is high we recommend you to play on different tables and blind limits since you then increase your chance of taking part of the jackpot payout.
Note that, only the BEST losing hand is eligible to with the largest share even if other hands also qualify. There can only be one true bad beat jackpot winner, and the biggest bad beat jackpot online ever paid out was to lucky winner RUGGIO who took home the jackpot sum of $1,200,000 at Carbon Poker.
