Introduction
Bad bead is a term in the poker. It refers to a hand where the player who had seemed to have the strongest cards loses. It most often happens when one of the players bet on their clearly stronger hand and the opponents decides to call on with a weaker hand but ends up winning on the turn or river card, which suddenly turns everything in their favor.
Poker players have not reached an agreement on what constitutes a bad beat. Sometimes players disagree whether a specific hand had been a bad beat or not.
Types of bad beats
Every hand, even being the absolute favorite, may eventually lose when the rest of the cards are dealt. But usually the following scenarios are involved in bad beats:
- The player calls a bet without having the best card or the right odds to call on the hand but still ends up winning. For example, the inferior hand may be turned into a winning one is the cards dealt of the turn and the river are to its benefit.
- On the other hand, it may be the case when a really stronger hand is beaten by an even stronger hand.
The bad beats in online poker
The online poker allows for more frequent bad beats and there are even some “bad beat” tables where the player who has the strongest losing hand wins a specific prize pool, which has been accumulated by taking an additional rake from each hand, played.
And according to statistics it is more likely to experience a bad beat due to online playing allowing for more played hands every hour. In addition, each player can play on multiple tables and this also increases the number of hands played per hour.
Bad beat jackpot
And now we get to the bad beat jackpots. They are specific prizes, which can be won when a strong enough hand is shown and loses to a stronger opponent. Some poker rooms do not offer bad beat jackpots, other have certain requirements – the losing hands needs to be strong enough to qualify for the bad beat jackpot (for example, some games require you to lose with a full house in order to be able to get this type of jackpot).
Usually the bad beat jackpots are progressive. They are accumulated by taking a small rake of each pot and this amount goes to the fund for the jackpot. When someone wins it, usually the reward is split among all of the players on this table at that time and the one whose hand qualified for the bad beat gets the largest part of the money with the next largest part goes to the hand that has won the pot and the rest of the players get an equal share of the remaining pot.
The exact conditions, rules, amounts and payout percentage are different among the various casinos and rooms so if you are playing in a room with a bad beat jackpot check what conditions apply.