Harrah’s Revamps Atlantic City Poker Bad Beat Jackpots

The new bad beat jackpot may increase traffic at Harrah’s-owned A.C. poker rooms.

It just got a little easier to win bad beat jackpot money in Atlantic City. Yesterday morning Harrah’s debuted a revamped bad beat jackpot that will pay players at the tables at any of the company’s four casinos in the East Coast gambling resort town. The company also changed the criteria for triggering the jackpot to make it easier to hit as the pool grows larger.

Players at Harrah’s Atlantic City, Bally’s Atlantic City, Caesars Atlantic City and the Showboat poker rooms will all contribute to the new progressive bad beat jackpot. Any player who takes a qualifying bad beat will get 30% of the jackpot, the player who wins the pot will get 20% of the pool, and the rest of the money will be distributed among every player at the tables in any of the participating poker rooms when the hand is dealt. To qualify for the jackpot, a player must have four queens beaten. But for every week that passes where the jackpot isn’t hit, the qualifying hand will move down by one rank (e.g. if nobody hits the jackpot for three weeks, the qualifying hand will become four nines).

Hands eligible for the new bad beat jackpot were first dealt yesterday morning, with the pool starting at $524,045. That’s almost as big as the previous record bad beat jackpot for all of Atlantic City, a $553,958 pool hit back in January at Caesars that also set the record for the largest live poker bad beat jackpot in history. Needless to say, the new arrangement in Harrah’s poker rooms in Atlantic City puts them in position to start setting some records pretty quickly. And given the new competition from neighboring Pennsylvania and the annual losses that have become routine for Atlantic City casinos, the changes probably couldn’t have come at a better time.