Party Poker Sees Intensive Traffic

Every poker player fears the bad beat – when you get a hand that's so unbeatably strong that you go all in on it, and someone follows you in ... with a better hand. That sinking feeling as the chips vanish has happened to every poker pro at some point in their career.

Many online poker sites cushion this situation of defeat by running a Bad Beat Jackpot: a small percentage of the rake from each hand is siphoned off into a separate progressive jackpot. The triggering hand value varies from site to site, but on average, the Bad Beat Jackpot is triggered when a player loses a hand while holding quad eights or better.

When this happens, the losing player is paid out from the progressive jackpot, as is every other player at the table, though in smaller amounts, and a portion of the jackpot is retained as seed for the new jackpot.

Now, Party Poker is one of the larger sites out there right now – at the time of writing there are more than 34,000 players logged in. Party Poker also runs a Bad Beat Jackpot, which was last hit this past Friday (October 30th) for $323,380.50 – an impressive chunk of change.

The rules state that a 20% slice remains in the pot to build the new jackpot on – in this case, around $64,000. But as you read this, the Bad Beat Jackpot at Party Poker is already worth almost $220,000 – just four days later!

The significance of this is that Party Poker is seeing enough traffic to grow their Bad Beat Jackpot by almost $40,000 a day. That's a huge amount of action – and if nobody hits it soon, this progressive should touch seven figures by around the 25th.

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