Worst Poker Hand Ever
The greatest “bad beat jackpot” in United States history just cushioned the blow of an absolutely rough hand of poker for a losing player and then some.
At the Motor City Casino in Detroit this week, a player who had four 3s lost to another who had four Queens, which is just the worst:
Enter any casino, and the Worst Poker Hand Ever biggest bets are always on the baccarat tables. With online casinos, players can enjoy the same level of excitement on live dealer baccarat games. Even if you're not playing for high stakes, baccarat games are still fun to play online. Remember last year during the World Series of Poker main event when this guy’s reaction made us think he’d lost the saddest poker hand ever? Erase that from your memory. This hand right here — from.
But because there was a “bad beat jackpot” in the casino, the losing player won a share of over $1 million. MLive.com explained how that worked:
At the Motor City Casino, in Texas Hold ’em poker, if a player hits any four of a kind and is beaten by another player’s four of a kind, they hit the bad beat jackpot. Both players must have pocket pairs. The four of a kind must only be beaten by another four of a kind. A straight flush only wins them the much smaller bad beat jackpot. The rules are slightly different at the MGM Grand Detroit and Greektown. The bad beat jackpot can be hit if a player’s four of a kind loses to a straight flush. That makes it slightly easier to win. The odds of hitting either are astronomical, but it does happen.
Many other poker rooms offer the jackpots, which gather money over time, and the majority of the cash in the pot (40 percent in this case, good for over $427,000 here) goes to the loser. The winning hand gets 20 percent, and the rest of the table (this time, it was six players) split the rest.
So in this case, it really did pay to lose.
The final table of the 2019 World Series of Poker $50,000 Poker Players Championship produced quite possibly the worst bad beat in poker history as Bryce Yockey saw a 99.843% hand turn into dust when Josh Arieh beat him on the final draw in 2-7 Triple Draw.
Nick Schulman coined the bad beat that Arieh put on Yockey, “The bad beat to end all bad beats,” before it happened and to fully grasp the situation you have to watch the clip.
Yockey started with the second strongest hand in the game, which has a 1 in 2,548 chance of occurring while Arieh needed three draws to beat him and make the only possible combination that would do so. A crazy detail about this hand is that the only path for Arieh to the winning hand was for him to make a straight first before he could draw to the perfect 7-5 low.
“This is the worst beat I’ve ever seen in a televised tournament,” Schulman said, as Yockey made his departure from the tournament in fourth place. Yockey collected $325,989 for his efforts after which John Esposito, Phil Hui, and Josh Arieh continued to battle for the $1,099,311 first prize. Watch the full final table of this event on PokerGO right now.
Understanding 2-7 Triple Draw
In the game of Limit 2-7 Triple Draw, the goal is to make the worst possible five-card hand without a straight or a flush. The best hand in this game, as shown in this video, is 7-5-4-3-2 followed by 7-6-4-3-2. In this game, there are three draws during which you can ask for as many new cards as you want.
Bad Beats in Texas Hold’em
Bad beats in poker are common and every player who’s played a game or two will have seen his or her aces disappear like snow in the bright Las Vegas sun when a king on the river gives your opponent three of a kind.
To provide some context on how crazy Yockey’s hand was, let’s draw some parallels with No Limit Texas Hold’em. Aces versus kings before the flop is an 81.06% favorite, a number that increases to 91.62% after a blank flop and 95.45% on the turn. Having only two cards to improve with the river to come is still a 4.55% chance of winning!
Worst Poker Hand Ever Recorded
In an even worse scenario, the worst of two sets on the flop has 4.34% with two cards to come and that number is reduced to 2.27% with only the river left to make four of a kind. For some more context, winning with ace-king offsuit versus ace-king offsuit has a 2.17% chance but in that case, of course, you are 95.65% to casually split the pot!
Ever played so wild that you ended up all in with deuce-three offsuit against pocket aces? Well, you still have a 13.3% chance to win the hand before the flop! After a random flop where your only remaining winning outs are running cards, however, you have a 1.52% chance to win and even that is still a lot better than having just 0.16% as Josh Arieh did!
Click this link to see the Twitter conversation about this hand in which some big name poker pros chime in on how unlikely this runout truly was.
Worst Poker Hand Ever Videos
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