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Rivered Royal Flush Negates Six-Figure Jackpot In Texas

$115,000 Bad Beat Jackpot Voided Due To Cardroom Rules

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Most poker players would love to see a river delivering them a royal flush and a sizable pot, but that certainly wasn’t the case at the Lodge Card Club in Texas.

Two players both flopped straight flushes and appeared to be in line to cash in on the property’s bad beat jackpot of almost $115,000. But per the card room’s rules, a one-outer ace on the river gave one of the players a royal flush and nixed any bad beat payouts.

A Look At The Hand

Bad beat jackpots can be found at many card rooms and pay out when one player has a premium hand that loses to another player with an even better hand.

The casino typically removes $1 from each cash game hand to fund the prize pool, but since the Lodge is located in Texas they can’t take a rake, instead charging a seat-rental membership fee of $11 per hour to play in the club.

The 68-table cardroom then seeds the jackpot to start at $100,000 and adds an additional $1,000 per day. So, it would take more than 9,000 playing hours to fund (less than a day at full capacity), not factoring in all other operating expenses. As a result, a series of bad beat jackpots in quick succession could be very costly for the cardroom.

The promotion usually pays out a larger sum to the loser, the second biggest amount to the winner, and a slightly smaller portion to the remaining players at the table.

Sometimes, that smaller portion is even paid out to all cash game players in the room at the time. That’s also the case at the Lodge, with 50% going to the player with the losing hand, 25% to the winner, and 25% to all other active players at the cash game tables.

In a hand of pot-limit Omaha, one player held 10Heart Suit 9Heart Suit 8Diamond Suit 7Diamond Suit on a flop of JDiamond Suit 10Diamond Suit 9Diamond Suit while another player held KHeart Suit KDiamond Suit QDiamond Suit 9Spade Suit. The JHeart Suit then came on the turn, followed by the ADiamond Suit on the river – giving the player the winning hand a royal flush.

However, the ace was a killer for the bad beat jackpot as the property has a rule that the qualifying hand for an Omaha game must be a straight flush, but only coming on the flop. In this case, seeing the winner’s hand improve to a royal flush on the river meant that the best hand was no longer made on the flop.

That proved costly as the loser of the hand would have collected $57,200 with the winner getting $28,600. With 39 other players in the room at the time, each would have also cashed in for $3,900 each.

These players may have missed out on the jackpot, but there have been some other nice bad beat payouts over the last year. In March, the Playground Poker Club in Montreal paid out a bad beat jackpot of $1.3 million. In November, Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh saw a royal flush beat quad aces for a payout of $905,622.

*Photo by Lodge Card Club – Twitter/X @DougPolkVids