A one-outer on the river recently prevented a bad beat jackpot from being triggered at The Lodge Card Club near Austin, Texas—possibly for the first time in poker history.
Yes, you read that right. The pot-limit Omaha (PLO) bad beat jackpot at The Lodge Card Club, co-owned by Doug Polk, Andrew Neeme, and Brad Owen, has grown to $118,000 from its $100,000 starting point. The jackpot qualifier was met on the flop when two players in a mid-stakes game each hit a straight flush. However, the qualifier was nullified when a one-outer royal flush appeared on the river, resulting in a true bad beat, but with no payout.
The Lodge Bad Beat Jackpot Breakdown
The flop revealed J♦ 9♦ 10♦, with one player holding 8♦ 7♦ and another holding K♦ Q♦, giving both players a straight flush. Under normal circumstances, this would qualify for the bad beat jackpot, especially for the player with the weaker hand.
At The Lodge Card Club, hitting a bad beat jackpot in PLO requires a straight flush to lose on the flop, with exactly two hole cards being played. A straight flush losing to a superior straight flush on the flop would typically trigger the jackpot. The payouts would have been as follows: 50% of the pot ($57,200) to the player with the losing hand, 25% ($28,600) to the player with the winning hand, and the remaining 25% to be shared among the other players at the table and within the room. With 39 players active in the room, each would have received $3,900, while table shares would have been $5,700 per player.
It looked like a moment of celebration was on the horizon for everyone in the game. One player stood to win nearly $60,000, another was set to pocket around $30,000, and even the players not directly involved in the hand were expecting a few thousand dollars each. However, due to a unique rule at The Lodge, nobody received a payout from the jackpot.
The turn brought an irrelevant J♥, but the A♦ on the river was both relevant and costly. The Lodge Card Club, the largest poker room in Texas, enforces a “flop only” rule for its bad beat jackpot. This means that for the jackpot to trigger, the qualifying hands must be flopped. Since the winning hand—a royal flush—materialized on the river, the bad beat jackpot was rendered null and void.
