In most circumstances, if you lose a hand with quads, you'd be so downtrodden that you would secretly swear to yourself to never play poker ever again. However, for a small group on that fateful Tuesday (January 16), it was certainly a magical day - they experienced something so rare in the world of poker that for sure it calls for a bottle of Dom Perignon.
On January 16 Tuesday, a US record breaking bad beat jackpot worth more than $1M dollars was paid out to a lucky player in a bricks-and-mortar casino located in Detroit, Michigan.
Inside a poker room at Detroit's Motor City Casino, at one of their 17 cash game tables, the epic jackpot of $1,068,590.80 was triggered when a player's quad threes was beaten by quad Queens.
Nobody wants to lose when playing poker, but with a massive bad beat on the line, losing with quads is certainly a poker player's dream. The size of the pot itself was unimportant relative to the bonus in the form of a bad beat.
The ‘loser' (yet sort of the big winner) of the hand, who only revealed his first name "Scott from Oxford, Michigan" was extremely lucky, as he got a colossal consolation prize for his huge hand losing the pot with quad threes when he was presented a check for $427,452.52 (40% of the total bad beat jackpot).
The winner of the hand, who only said his name as "Kenneth", got himself a sweet $213,712.76 (20% of the bad beat jackpot) for having quad Queens.
The rest of the 40% of the jackpot was shared between the other four players at the table, and each of them received a nice $106,856.28 just for folding! Furthermore, they were playing six-handed at a ten-seat table, and this occurrence of a couple of empty seats is also rare, so each of the non-participating players walked away with double than what they could have originally had!
Some of the key reasons the jackpot had gotten to that huge sum is that in order to win the full amount, the winning and losing hands must BOTH have to be a four-of-a-kind and that both players should have to be holding pocket pairs. Also, there should be at least four players dealt into the hand. Another but not so significant rule is that the pot must reach $20, and of course it would have to be a fairly low-stakes game for quads vs quads not to escalate into an over $20 pot. At the Motor City Casino, they have a jackpot for straight flushes or quads being beaten by higher straight flushes and royal flushes, but it is considerably lower than the main bad-beat jackpot.
Senior Vice President of Motor City's Casino Operations Phil Trofibio said, "There are winners every day on the floor, but it's not every day that a jackpot that big hits. Congratulations to all the players at the table."
Actually, this is the second massive bad beat jackpot to have occurred this year! On January 7 Sunday, a $994,000 jackpot was triggered at an online poker room on the US-facing Chico Gaming network, with the ‘loser' taking a 27.5% of the bounty worth $273,382.82, the winner of the hand getting $149,018.49, while the other two players on the table each claimed $74,509.24. It wasn't such a lucky time for the other two players at the table who missed out on $37,000+ each as they were both sitting out when the jackpot was won - their share went to two players not involved in the action! The rest of the $994K was set aside, approximately under $500K, for the next bad beat jackpot.
Of course, while the almost $1.1 million bad beat jackpot is the biggest so far of its kind in the country, it actually doesn't hold the top spot in North America. In August 2017, a jackpot worth $1.2 million was hit at a $1-$2 Texas NLHE table at the Playground Poker Club in Québec, Canada, with quad Jacks losing to queen-high straight flush.
Sources:
https://www.pokernews.com/news/2018/01/poker-players-in-detroit-hit-biggest-bad-beat-jackpot-29747.htm?itm_content=pn-hp-hero-4
https://twitter.com/MotorCityCasino
https://youtu.be/vk1GcUesRXc
