I have read a number of low limit hold em books over the years! (Currently reading the "Winners Guide to Texas Hold Em - Ken Warren). None of them dealt with starting hand selection when it comes to playing in games that have High hand pay outs and/or bad beats. In my home casino, Seneca Niagara, it's not uncommon to see someone call three bets cold pre-flop if they have a pocket pair/Suited connectors because of the bad beat. (No high hands payouts except on Mondays!!!)

Is there a point, Preflop, when you should let a hand go if you have say 7 & 8 of Hearts...early position and the bad beat is $190,000 and straight flushes are paying $50/ $100 etc?? Or is it wise to see the flop in LIMIT hold em regardless of the cost, if the jackpot possibly awaits?

Thanks folks for anyfeedback!!

I wrote a post a while back on high hand and bad beat jackpots. Long story short, it's rarely if ever worth it to play a hand differently just to chase a bonus.

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Good grief.

If you have a pocket pair your probability of hitting quads with it is 1 in 407, so if the promo payout is $100 that will add less than twenty-five cents additional value to your hand. I don't have the odds right at the moment for making a straight flush with suited connectors, but it is considerably less than that. And the probability that you both you and someone else will be making quads and straight flushes simultaneously becomes so infinitesimal that even with a stupendous payout it adds essentially nothing - the equity in that can safely be assumed to be less than a penny.

Are you playing at a $0.02/$0.04 table? If so, then the tiny possibility of a promo payout could arguably become a small rational preflop consideration. But if you are playing something where a bet is as much as a whole dollar, then it has no material effect on the potential value of your hand, and it would be more sensible to go stand on a streetcorner waiting for a box of money to fall out of the the back of a truck at your feet. Which is essentially what people do when they pack into poker rooms with a multi-property progressive BBJ at times when it gets high, waiting for days or weeks for someone somewhere at one of many tables at multiple casinos to finally hit it so they can collect a player's share. After which those rooms become complete ghost towns for a long time, because everyone is so broke after paying the absolute minimum they could get away with while hanging around to "win" their share of the promo.

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+1 to Local Rock.

Bad beat jackpots only grow to large amounts if the correct hand combinations do not hit. The fact that so many BBJs get so big indicates the low probability of hitting them. That said, the Choctaw Casino in Durant, OK started a $100K BBJ in Feb or Mar last year, where IIRC Quad 8s had to lose and both players had to use both hole cards. By the time I played there in June, they had suspended that jackpot, because it was hit twice in the same weekend, only a few weeks after it started.

Were a coupla poker room employees later seen motoring around Oklahoma in spanking new BMWs? Just sayin'.

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Life is six to five against.
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LOL. No, but one of the players who hit was at my table in June, and I think she mentioned a new ride.

As a number of posters have mentioned, chasing the jackpots is a bad idea.

However, if you are playing limit hold'em at a relatively passive table (not many preflop raises and a lot of limpers), then playing 7-8 suited even from early position can be profitable in terms of winning the pot. Too many people chase with too much crap in low stakes limit -- played a lot of it over the past few years, I know. So, learn good limit strategy (my personal favorite read for these games is Small Stakes Hold'em by Ed Miller) and then pick spots to "chase" with hands that can win big pots. Don't do it for the jackpot but for the money to can rake in from worse players -- and then if you get lucky and snag some bonus jackpot cash, it's all gravy.

Dave

P.S. I've nitted it up in the limit games at Seneca Niagara a few times -- even played an event in the Fall Classic last year and posted something about it here.

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The opinions in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Poker Atlas, AVP or PokerTrip Enterprises.

Great feedback folks. I'm getting a better idea. At Seneca last night 2/4, I threw away 6-5 hearts in Mp, behind a pre-flop raiser. Held my breath...Flop came A c - 9 s- 5 d...I felt like a genius!!!

Dave - I've played with a lot of folks from Cleveland. Bus(es) come up every day. With you guys getting your own casino, The Horseshoe, something tells me the traffic up I-90 may stop!
Good luck!

Thanks! Looking forward to the Horseshoe opening; although at least with Erie, the drive got a little shorter for me. Never done a bus trip, strictly driving up on my own, usually on a weekend and sometimes stayed over ans hit the Falls tourist traps.

Dave

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The opinions in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Poker Atlas, AVP or PokerTrip Enterprises.

You know, depending on how the particular table is playing at the time, I wouldn't have wanted to disagree too strongly if you'd decided to call instead, just not because of magical dreams of straight flushes. I'll tend to dump it to a raise in front of me more often than not, since I'm allergic to CALLING preflop raises in just about any situation I don't think merits making a raise of my own, but... if you feel confident that with the players yet to act you're unlikely to get trapped for yet another raise or three preflop, there are multiple players already in for a bet (who'll almost certainly see a flop for just one more bet now), and you believe you're likely to get called in multiple places on more than one round when you do hit the board hard...

...and most of all, you are capable of quickly and calmly letting go of that sucker without muss or fuss or a moment of hesitation or regret when you don't hit, and are never tempted to keep digging by starting to convince yourself that pairing your five with a six kicker in a multiway pot means you sorta kinda hit your hand.

There are a lot of NL folk who never learned the fundamentals of the game in LHE who routinely don't get this, but the implied odds with speculative hands (ratio of immediate cost v. potential pot size to be won) in loose limit games are often as significant as in NL and sometimes greater, except that unlike NL we aren't relying on value from fold equity and usually don't even want any. We get those implied odds from having multiple callers on multiple streets when we are able to correctly put in bets and raises before we "get there" with strong draws that are immediately +EV to bet without a "made hand" because our added money is highly leveraged as a relatively small percentage of what we get added into the that pot by making those bets. If we are "only" going to win the hand about a third of the time, and we are putting in a fifth of the money, we are miles ahead, especially compared to someone putting in half the money while praying for a fold in order to win a small pot rather than lose a big one.

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Life is six to five against.
-Damon Runyon