Bad Beat structures - what do you like?

[juanez]

I'm flooring at a casino in Colorado. This room has been the nut room in town for years and years as far as number of games and revenue. In the "old days" we would be full and have 70 or 80 players on a list on the weekends. Our bad beat is "Aces full of Jacks beaten" and has been that way forever. At this point we are the easiest bad beat to hit in town and it hits often enough. We had a run of it hitting about once a week for about 10 weeks and actually had it hit twice in one day during that period. It was a crazy few months for the BB.

Anyway, one of the smaller poker rooms across the street made their bad beat quads beaten several months ago, seeded it with $100K, and never looked back. They have been taking players from us for months and frankly have been cutting into our bottom line. The feedback from the players is "the bad beat is HUGE...I have to play there".

Now it's my humble opinion that a bad beat is just something that happens and not something to "play for" specifically. But I guess if you're going to play a specific game that two rooms spread and one has a huge bad beat, why not play there?

Of course we all hear the players say "I have a bad beat hand" and garbage like that. Apparently, there is a significant portion of the poker playing community (at least here in CO) that wants a HUGE bad beat number to shoot for regardless of the rediculous odds to hit it.

So what do you think is a good bad beat structure? We're thinking of just copying the other rooms deal and make it quads beaten, maybe seed it with promotional funs, etc.

One idea (among many) we are considering is to make two structures:
First one is Aces full of Tens beaten, the second is Quads beaten. We would split the jackpot rake between the two.

If the BB hand is just aces full of tens beaten, they just get the jackpot for that. If it's quads beaten, they get both jackpots.

Good idea? What else do you "bad beat players" want to see?

[bernie]

How big is your room? Must be big if you're hitting As over Js every week for 10 weeks. My room was 18 tables and we didn't hit it that often. Though some weeks it was hit often, there were droughts.

Around here a good BBJ would be about $30k when it hits. That was about average around here in other rooms also.

If they really want it huge, remember you don't have to jump to Quads beaten. You have 2 more cards to use. As full of Qs or Ks before then. We have quads beaten now and it seems to reach about $130k+ at times. The highest was about $300k. That one took awhile to build up.

Imo, 2 structures kinda sucks. We used to have it. One was the BBJ and the other was the Super JP(str8flush beaten by str8flush). If you want to build a high JP, keep it to one JP. We rake into 3 funds now. The initial JP, the backup, then the 3rd. Why add a 4th one?

One promotional deal they did here that they did away with was FH drawings. Tues-Thurs from noon - 2am, every hour, they did a drawing. To qualify you had to have tens full. To win, you had to be in a live game when your name was drawn. Tickets stayed in for a month, then started over at months end. $100 to start the time slot. If no one won that hours drawing, it carried over, +$100 to the next week, same hour. Some got up around $4k at times. They took it off because there was a run where no one was really winning and a minority complained. Once they took it off, volume of the room noticeably dropped a bit during the usual drawing times.

b

[Dennisa]

Try the opposite. Make your bad beat easier Aces full of anything beaten by quads. Smaller jackpots more often.

Add a few hours everyday of aces cracked, win a rack. This will bring in regulars to play since it can be won about once a few. Hustler in LA has it 11-12, 1-2 and 3-4 M-Th and 11-12, 1-2 on Fri-Sun. Very popular there.

[runout_mick]

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How big is your room? Must be big if you're hitting As over Js every week for 10 weeks.

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You might be getting hit by teams as well. We had a cardroom lately that uncovered a team. Turns out that the dealer involved had also dealt a disproportionate number of bad beat hands at his last casino as well...

Just something to consider.

[Siegmund]

If they are going for size that means they aren't hitting very often... I would definitely recommend some sort of "$1000 every night" (or whatever amount is enough to be significant to your players) promo... in a small room it can be high hand each hour, or x amount per royal.. whatever is visible, so that lots of folk will go home telling their friends stories about what they won.

Admittedly I am biased, as I hate the idea of BBJs at all, and REALLY hate making them harder to hit (same expectation, worse variance).

[RR]

I saw Sam's Town in Las Vegas get burned by the quads over quads jackpot. They put it in at $100k. THey got basically no additional play out of it so they wanted to go back to the old structure. They had to give players notice, but then it actually hit, they paid out the $100k and went back to the old structure. In CO your hands are tied because you have to be spreading the same games as everyone else (I am assuming there is stil a $5 bet max).

You could do a double structure where an easier to hit JP (aces full) gets 10% of the current JP. The other thing you cold do is take more JP money to make it bigger (if you can easily increase that within the gaming regs there). Most jackpot chasers don't notice when the jackpot drop gets switched from $1 to $2.

[psandman]

Ypu don't mention what qualifiers you have. Is it any A's full of Jacks beaten. You could add some qualifications to that -- like A's full of jacks beaten by Quads (or better) and require the Quads to have a pocket pair. By doing this you make the bad bead harder to hit, but it doesn't sound as bad.

[juanez]

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How big is your room? Must be big if you're hitting As over Js every week for 10 weeks. My room was 18 tables and we didn't hit it that often. Though some weeks it was hit often, there were droughts.


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We have 18 tables. Yeah, the "once a week" for 2.5 months was a bit rough. It usually doesn't hit nearly that often. Just a wierd few months.

Our 5/5 ($5 limit, yeah it sucks) games BB is usually $30K - $40K. It has gotten to to the $130K range.

Thanks for the ideas.

[juanez]

[ QUOTE ]
I saw Sam's Town in Las Vegas get burned by the quads over quads jackpot. They put it in at $100k. THey got basically no additional play out of it so they wanted to go back to the old structure. They had to give players notice, but then it actually hit, they paid out the $100k and went back to the old structure. In CO your hands are tied because you have to be spreading the same games as everyone else (I am assuming there is stil a $5 bet max).


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Yeah, we still have a $5 max bet here, so that's the root of the issue. A huge BB number draws the people in. We're all spreading the same games.

Our sister casino did the old "seed the BB with $100K" ploy, made the BB Aces full of Kings, and had it hit a like 2 months later. Not good.

[ QUOTE ]
You could do a double structure where an easier to hit JP (aces full) gets 10% of the current JP. The other thing you cold do is take more JP money to make it bigger (if you can easily increase that within the gaming regs there). Most jackpot chasers don't notice when the jackpot drop gets switched from $1 to $2.

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Yeah, we're usually taking in $2 on every hand (the max allowed) in the "bigger games" anyway. The smaller games (2/5 spread) get there sometimes, but not often enough. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

Thanks for the ideas Randy.

[juanez]

[ QUOTE ]
Ypu don't mention what qualifiers you have. Is it any A's full of Jacks beaten. You could add some qualifications to that -- like A's full of jacks beaten by Quads (or better) and require the Quads to have a pocket pair. By doing this you make the bad bead harder to hit, but it doesn't sound as bad.

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Good point. Ours is Aces full of Jacks beaten by anything. I like your idea man. I think I'll push this one to "the man". Thanks!