Bankroll Builder: Bad Beat Jackpot at Carbon Poker

Staff : October 16th, 2008

“Bankroll Builder” is an article series where we highlight solid values for online poker players – covering bonuses, soft games, special tournaments, and so on. This installment focuses on the Bad Beat at Carbon Poker, a room on the Merge Network.

Details
The Carbon Poker Bad Beat jackpot is fast approaching half a million dollars. Players can qualify for the jackpot on specially marked ‘Bad Beat’ tables that are available for both no limit and limit games. When you take a look at the requirements, it’s easy to understand why it hasn’t hit for quite some time:

# The losing hand must be at least a Four of a Kind 7’s
# The winning hand must be at least a Four of a Kind 8’s
# Both the winning and losing hands must include both hole cards, and in the case of a Four of a Kind must include a pocket pair.
# At least four players must be dealt in at the start of the hand
# The hand must have generated jackpot rake (ie. $0.50)
# Two or more players must be active at the end of the hand, and it must go to showdown

The jackpot is distributed as follows: 30% to the loser of the hand, 17.5% to the winner, 17.5% to the other players at the table, 20% to reseeding the jackpot and 10% to the room.

Where’s the value?
The jackpot is obviously tough to hit, and under normal conditions there wouldn’t be all that much of an appeal. However, Carbon has a few things going for it. First off is the size of the jackpot – approaching half a million dollars. Second is the fact that Carbon is a fairly small room, so you can cover most (or all) of the Bad Beat jackpot tables when you play with relative ease. Third is that the games are pretty soft and the stakes are fairly small (limit tops out general at 5/10 and NL at 2/4), so you can cover all of the tables without straining your bankroll.

Availability
Bad Beat jackpot games are generally running at all times on Carbon, with the largest number running during normal peak hours (afternoon and evening EST).

Extras
Carbon offers rakeback (30%) and pays that rakeback daily. They also have lots of smaller buy in tournaments with solid overlay values. They also have recurring bonuses, both for first deposits and reloads. Like many mid-tier rooms, they’re very good about rewarding players on a regular basis.

Sign up for Carbon Poker Rakeback here.