In poker “Bad beat” means having a hand with an outstanding chance of winning, only to go on to lose. A number of poker rooms offer a progressive jackpot for bad beats – and some players like to join these specifically designated games to try for the prize pool.

You register for play at specific ‘bad beat’ cash game tables and a jackpot contribution is drawn from each hand – and usually displayed as a separate chip stack. The jackpot is struck when a bad beat hand qualifies – and all raked players in that hand generally earn a portion of the pot – with the player with losing bad beat hand generally walking off with the lion’s share ~50% of the prize pool.

Different poker rooms apply different definitions to a ‘bad beat’, and these rules generally fall into 3 categories of ‘bad beat’.

• Category 1 bad beat:  Both the bad beat and winning hand must be the best possible combination of five cards. In cases where the same hand can be created multiple ways (for example player has AK and the board shows AAKKQ) the player’s hole cards will take priority. Both the bad beat and winning hand must make use of both hole cards. A full house must be beaten by a four of a kind or higher.
• Category 2 bad beat:  The same as type 1, plus any four of a kind, whether the bad beat hand or winning hand, must contain a pocket pair.
• Category 3 bad beat:  The same as type 2, plus a full house may not make use of a three of a kind entirely on the board.

Here’s an excerpt from an odds table by “the wizard of odds” that demonstrates the bad beat probabilities of each bad beat hand under all three types of rules. The most stringent rules, the “Bad Beat Type 3”, are generally the most commonly found at online Poker rooms.

The table is based on a ten-player game in which players never fold and are the result of random simulations of about 2.5 billion rounds each. (Go the Wizard!)

BetVictor Poker on the Microgaming Poker Network are one of the top poker rooms with Badbeat rules that differ from the badbeat rules to categories 1-3 above – so it really pays to read the rules at each Poker site before you play.

>>Visit BetVictor Poker for a look around