Where losing means winning: Poker players chase 'bad beat' jackpot

At the Palm Beach Kennel Club's poker room, a bad hand may soon prove to be the luckiest draw of them all.

After going unclaimed since Dec. 28, the club's player-fed "bad beat" jackpot has grown to a record level of nearly $200,000. That's not only the highest in Kennel Club history, it's also believed to be the highest ever among Florida's state-regulated poker rooms at dog and horse tracks and jai-alai frontons, where players consider themselves fortunate if they take home $1,000 in a single winning day.



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But the bad beat isn't about winning. It's about losing in the most bizarre way.

The jackpot is claimed when a player with a nearly unbeatable hand (say, four kings) loses to another with an even better one (say, four aces). The "loser" (with four kings) gets 50 percent of the jackpot, the "winner" (with four aces) 25 percent and the rest of the players at the table split the remaining 25 percent - an impressive payday for all involved.

But an unlikely one, too. Kennel Club officials estimate that there's about a 1-in-112,000 chance any given hand will yield a bad beat. And with as many as nine players occupying each table, the odds that any given player will win the bad beat are more like one in a million.

"It's all chance," said card room manager Jonathon Miller.

Still, you have to be in it to, er, lose it. Which may explain why the Kennel Club has seen as much as a 25 percent increase in business since the jackpot started climbing into record territory.

"I told my wife, 'Don't count on seeing me,' " said poker room regular Jeff Charlton, 40, of Lake Worth.

As of Friday night, the Kennel Club jackpot stood at $191,576. But given that it grows by about $3,000 to $4,000 per day, it could easily hit $200,000 on Monday.

That's provided, of course, no one claims it first. Kennel Club officials say the bad beat is hit on average once every two weeks, yielding more modest jackpots of $40,000 to $60,000. But bad beats have been known to go well beyond $200,000 around the country. And last year, an online poker site produced a bad beat payoff of $821,670.

Which means the Kennel Club's jackpot could have a way to go. But adding to the excitement over potential riches is a certain degree of confusion.

The bad beat comes with a set of rules that make the voting procedures at an Iowa political caucus seem simple. It's not so much a question of four kings vs. four aces - a full house also can qualify, provided it's at a certain rung in the poker ladder (a hand of three aces and two jacks or better).

But those are just the rules governing Texas Hold'em, the most popular form of poker, where players start with two cards that are dealt face down. If the game is seven card stud or Omaha high-low, different rules apply, though players at the Kennel Club all feed into and share the same jackpot. (For every pot that's $10 or more, the Kennel Club sets aside $1 for the bad beat.)

Given that the jackpot is now reaching a level where the winner could walk away with enough money to buy a starter condo, it's no wonder players often let the excitement get the best of them. Card room managers are having to reiterate the rules to novices who think they've won the bad beat, only to learn that their hands don't qualify.

The irony is that poker, which has become hugely popular in the past decade with the advent of televised tournaments, is normally considered as much a game of strategy as chance. But there's simply no bluffing your way into a bad beat. It's all about beating the odds.

"It's like Lotto," said Antonio Pinzari, a poker pro who runs a school in Lake Worth for prospective dealers.

Pinzari added that the bad beat jackpot was conceived in the mid-1980s in California. "It was initially designed to attract players away from the competition," he said.

As for Pinzari, he has been lucky enough to sit at a bad beat table only once. But he wasn't the big winner. And the jackpot wasn't all that big, either.

"I got about $900," he said.

News Added: 16 February, 2008

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