A New Poker ‘Bad Beat Jackpot’ World Record Was Hit With A Brutal Quads Vs Straight Flush Hand

iStockphoto / Liudmila Chernetska

One explanation for the incredible world record poker bad beat jackpot that just happened at the Playground Casino in Quebec is sometimes the Poker Gods wake up and choose chaos.

A much simpler explanation is that over the course of thousands and thousands of poker hands dealt, statistical anomalies are bound to show up in the form of bad beats like the one below.

This is, however, not just any bad beat jackpot. It set a new world record for the largest bad beat jackpot paid out in live casino poker history. And some specific contributing factors had to happen in order to bring this to fruition. At this particular casino, they take $2 for the Bad Beat Jackpot (on top of a $11 max rake at $1/2) and BBJ starts at Quad Aces, going down one level every three months.

So the Bad Bead Jackpot has a LOT of time to grow to record levels until a statistically improbable hand such as this comes along:

The Playground Casino announced their record-setting $2,590,185 bad beat jackpot after 4-of-a-King (quad 10s) lost to a straight flush (6-7-8-9-10 diamonds).

The payouts for this bad beat jackpot are 40% to the loser of the hand, 20% to the winner, 20% to the rest of the players at the table, and 20% to the rest of the eligible players in the casino at that time.

According to this post on Reddit, that breaks down to $984,270 for the loser of the hand, $429,135 to the winner, and $70,305 to each player at the table.

I’m not sure what the specific odds of four-of-a-kind 10s losing to a 6d-10d straight flush is. But the odds of 4 aces losing to a Royal Flush are “8,448/2,781,381,002,400 = 0.0000000060747, or about 1 in 165 million” according to an ancient article on the Wizard of Odds.

Approaching these odds is a hand where Quad Queens lost to a Royal Flush during the World Series of Poker this year.

Seeing true ‘bad beats’ in person like quads losing to a straight flush happens significantly less than online. Both live and online poker players are keenly aware this is because significantly more hands are dealt in online poker.

Thus, online poker players tend to over-inflate the chances of seeing a bad beat such as this while witnessing something like this in-person, a world record bad beat jackpot, is virtually unheard of.

The Playground Poker Club announced the Bad Beat Jackpot has now been reset to $700,863 to start growing again. There also have been no mentions of how much the dealer got tipped. Here’s to hoping they made some coin off that hand.