Most poker players would be happy if they were presented with a royal flush on the river and a big pot, but that was certainly not the case at the Lodge Card Club in Texas.
Two players both flopped straight flushes and were close to winning the house’s bad beat jackpot of nearly $115,000. However, according to the rules of the card room, an ace on the river gave one of the players a royal flush and negated any bad beat payouts.
A look at the hand
Bad beat jackpots are available in many card rooms and are paid out when a player with a premium hand loses to another player with an even better hand.
The casino typically takes $1 from each cash game hand to replenish the prize pool, but since the lodge is located in Texas, they cannot take a rake and instead charge a seat rental fee of $11 per hour to play at the club.
The 68-table cardroom then sets the jackpot at $100,000 and adds another $1,000 each day. So it would take more than 9,000 hours of play to fund the jackpot (less than a day at full capacity), not including all other operating costs. As a result, a series of bad beat jackpots in quick succession could be very costly for the cardroom.
The promotion typically pays a larger amount to the loser, the second-largest amount to the winner, and a slightly smaller amount to the remaining players at the table.
Sometimes this smaller portion is even paid out to all cash game players who are in the room at the time. This is also the case in the Lodge, with 50% going to the player with the losing hand, 25% to the winner, and 25% to all other active players at the cash game tables.
In a hand of Pot-Limit Omaha, a player had 10
9 8
7 on a flop of J 10 9 while another player held K K Q 9
The J then came on the turn, followed by A on the river – which gives the player the winning hand, a royal flush.
The ace was a killer for the bad beat jackpot, however, because there is a rule in the system that the qualifying hand for an Omaha game must be a straight flush, but that can only come on the flop. In this case, improving the winner’s hand to a royal flush on the river meant that the best hand no longer came on the flop.
This proved costly, as the loser of the hand would have received $57,200 and the winner $28,600. Since there were 39 other players in the room at the time, each of them would have won $3,900 as well.
These players may have missed out on the jackpot, but there were some other nice bad beat payouts last year. In March, Playground Poker Club in Montreal paid out a bad beat jackpot of $1.3 million. In November, a royal flush beat four aces at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh for a payout of $905,622.
*Photo by Lodge Card Club – Twitter/X @DougPolkVids
