Biggest Bad Beat Jackpot in History Goes at Playground Poker
Playground Poker has been the site of several eye-watering bad beat jackpots over the past few years but the biggest ever was just awarded with over $2.5 million being handed out to poker players at the iconic Canadian poker club.
No one likes a bad beat at the live poker tables – getting your money in with quads only to be crushed by bigger quads or a straight flush is one of the worst feelings in poker but sometimes it can actually be a good thing.
Many poker rooms have bad beat jackpots running that keep increasing over time as more and more hands are played until a truly brutal beat happens at the cash tables. When that happens, it’s often not such a painful experience for losing player since it triggers a rain of cash that often extends to the entire poker room.
Playground Poker Club in Kahnawake, QC, close to Montreal, is famous for its bad beat jackpots, and on Aug 2nd, 2023, the club handed out another record jackpot. After setting the previous record last year, Playground Poker handed out more than $2.5 million ($CDN) this week after a brutal hand where quads were crushed by a straight flush.
A Playground for Bad Beats
The most recent jackpot came in the early evening of Aug 2, 2023 and the eventual loser of the hand flopped quad tens. That was the nuts on the flop, but there were two gapped diamonds on the board as well for straight flush outs.
The seven of diamonds on the turn brought in the gut shot straight flush to the winner’s nine-six of diamonds crushing the flopped nuts. While that would normally be a horrible feeling of losing a big pot, it’s likely the players involved knew that the bad beat jackpot was sitting at truly mind-blowing numbers.
With quad tens as a qualifying hand, there was really no way for the flopped quads to lose as, even if a straight flush came, it would trigger the bad beat which generally gives the biggest share of the jackpot to the losing player in the hand. When it was triggered this week, the jackpot was sitting at $2,590,185 ($CDN) which comes out at about $1.94 million in American dollars.
The two players involved in the hand will take the most money from the record jackpot, but they weren’t the only ones in on the record haul. As is typical with bad beat jackpots, there was also a share handed out to the other players at the table where the hand happened, and in the case of Playground Poker, there is almost always a room share as well so that every player in action at a cash table when the jackpot goes gets a piece of the action. There were no details at press time about how this jackpot was divided up.
Club Beats its Own Record
Playground Poker Club seems to be the home of record bad beat jackpots. It was the same poker room that set the previous record in June of 2022 with a jackpot of $2.2 million ($1.64 million USD). Coincidentally, that hand was also a case of quad tens beaten by a straight flush, but it wasn’t the only time the Canadian poker room set the record – back in 2017 it set the bad beat jackpot record at $1.375 million when quad queens were crushed by the Royal.
The Canadian club isn’t the only place to hand out bad beat jackpots bigger than $1 million. The biggest ever jackpot on US soil happened almost a year ago at Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino when $1.2 million was handed out after quad aces were cracked by a royal flush in spades.
