Losing with an enormous poker hand is painful. Losing with one of the strongest hands imaginable is the kind of moment you remember for years.

On GGPoker, however, some of those brutal losses can come with a very unexpected consolation prize: the GGPoker Bad Beat Jackpot.

It is a jackpot designed specifically for rare situations where an extremely strong hand loses to an even stronger one. And when it happens, the losing player is not the only person who can get paid.

How the GGPoker Bad Beat Jackpot works

The basic idea is simple: lose with a qualifying monster hand at an eligible cash table and the Bad Beat Jackpot can trigger automatically.

There is no separate registration and no jackpot button to press. The hand must reach showdown, and both the winning and losing hands must satisfy the relevant rules. In particular, both players must use their required hole cards as part of their best five-card combination.

The exact minimum losing hand depends on the game.

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Which hands qualify?

Under the current GGPoker rules, the trigger starts at:

• Hold'em and Rush & Cash Hold'em: Aces full of Tens or better
• PLO and Rush & Cash PLO: Four Deuces or better
• PLO-5: Four Eights or better
• PLO-6: Four Jacks or better
• Short Deck: Four Sixes or better

For four-of-a-kind jackpots, the qualifying player must also have the relevant pocket pair in their hole cards. So simply seeing four matching cards appear on the board is not enough.

Who gets the money?

This is where the Bad Beat Jackpot becomes more interesting than simply compensating the unlucky player: when a qualifying jackpot is triggered, the current payout percentages are:

• Bad Beat winner (the player who loses the pot): 10%
• Opponent who wins the pot: 3%
• Other eligible players: 0.8% each

In other words, being dealt into the right table at the right moment can be enough to receive a jackpot reward even if you were not involved in the final showdown.

Prizes are awarded automatically at the end of the hand and credited directly to the player's wallet.

Where does the jackpot come from?

The Bad Beat Jackpot is funded through eligible GGPoker cash games. In Hold'em, Omaha and Rush & Cash games, sufficiently large pots contribute a small amount to the shared jackpot fund. Short Deck uses a similar system based on antes.

That fund keeps accumulating until qualifying hands trigger payouts, and players can also see the current Bad Beat Jackpot pool from the GGPoker client.

Important exceptions to know

A few limitations are worth mentioning, even in a short explainer:

• Featured tables do not qualify
• If the hand is run multiple times, only the first run counts
• In Rush & Cash, the jackpot only applies if 6 players were dealt in
• Players who were not dealt hole cards do not receive the “rest of players” share
• If more than three players have jackpot-qualified hands, the second-best hand is treated as the Bad Beat winner, while the other losing qualified hands receive the smaller table share
• If a player already qualifies, disconnection or leaving the table does not cancel the reward

The best possible way to lose a poker hand?

Nobody wants to watch a huge full house or four of a kind get beaten, but poker occasionally produces exactly those ridiculous collisions where two almost unbeatable hands appear at the same time.

Normally that means one player celebrates and another stares silently at the screen but with the GGPoker Bad Beat Jackpot, sometimes the second-best hand at the table can produce the biggest surprise of the entire session.