An online player with the alias RIVERMAN1969 from Pasadena, Maryland won $325,212.40 after being beaten in a hand of Texas Hold’em Poker.

This is not all that surprising as it may seem because he was playing the Bad Beat Jackpot at the online poker room Absolute Poker.

This was the largest ever bad beat jackpot in the history of online poker and at $996,115.28 it was marginally short of the $1 million mark. What a great event that would have been! The Bad Beat Jackpot is a win-win situation for everyone because everyone gets to share the loot. Included in the scheme of things are the bad beat loser, the winner of the hand, each and every player on the table and not to forget the house at Absolutepoker.com.

A bad beat occurs when a hand that is statistically favored to win suddenly loses because another player draws an unlikely card that puts him ahead. RIVERMAN1969 had a hand with four tens, normally a sure shot winner. Another player, BFOXY was holding three queens. As the final community cards turned up they showed a queen, giving BFOXY four queens to RIVERMAN1969’s four tens. According to the rules at Absolute Poker a bad beat occurs if a player loses with a hand that holds which is ranked at four eights or better. Hence this was a bad beat and the jackpot was hit. Absolute Poker distributes the jackpot as follows. 10% goes to cover the costs of the house. Another 25% is carried forward to the next jackpot. This may not seem a good idea to the winner, but the idea is that if the next jackpot is hit immediately thereafter the next winner should get something in hand. Of the remaining 65% half goes to the bad bead victim and this gave RIVERMAN1969 over $325,000. One fourth goes to the winner of the hand and accordingly BFOXY received over $160,000. The remaining amount is shared equally between all the other players who are playing the same poker game with the same limits, whether on the table the bad beat occurred or on other tables. This rule enabled 88 players to get a slice of the jackpot for not doing anything. Incidentally the jackpot is funded from the pots at the Bad Beat Jackpot tables. $0.50 from the pot of each raked hand that is raked $0.25 or more contributes to the Bad Beat Jackpot.

Absolute Poker introduced the Bad Beat Jackpot over a year ago. The previous highest record for a bad beat jackpot was also held by Absolute Poker. This happened in August 2007. The increasing online poker traffic indicates that online players will not have to wait for another 10 months before this record is broken and this time the magical mark of $1 million will be breached. An Absolutepoker.com spokesperson put things in perspective when he said, “We’re hitting milestones, breaking records and making ordinary poker players extraordinarily rich. Bad Beat Jackpot continues to attract an enormous number of poker players to Absolute Poker and we can't wait to beat the industry record we just set once again.