Summary:
Eight lucky players at a US-based casino won a $1,226,765.80 bad-beat prize this week, setting a new record for a bad-beat prize. Raymond Brodersen, Pennsylvania’s Raymond Brodersen won the biggest share of the prize when his flopped quad ace was bested on the river by Benjamin Flanagan, West Virginia’s Benjamin Flanagan.
Eight lucky players won a $1,226,765.80 bad beat at the Rivers Casino Pittsburgh, setting a new record for a bad beat at a US-based casino. Benjamin Flanagan, from West Virginia, collected the most money when his flopped quad ace was bested on the river by Raymond Brodersen, who filled a royal flush.
Brodersen collected $368,029 as the winner of the actual hand that produced the largesse, in addition to whatever the actual pot was in the $1/$3 no-limit hold’em game, which Rivers Casino did not mention in its presser. There were six other players at the table and all of them got a piece of the money. Five of the six remaining players were from Pittsburgh or elsewhere in western Pennsylvania, while the other two were from Morgantown, West Virginia.
The previous US casino record of $1,068,590.80 was set in January of last year at Detroit’s Motor City Casino. In terms of paid live in North America, the hit at Rivers Casino is the largest ever. The Playground Poker Room in Montreal, Quebec, paid out a $1.375 million bad-beat prize in April of last year. At the time, the Canadian dollar was worth about $1 million in US dollars, which is about 80 percent of the US dollar.
The casino was designed to produce high-amount winners
The bad-beat prize at Rivers Casino hadn’t been hit since April of 2021, when it was cracked for a little over $150,000. The casino paid out a large amount of money in 2017: the previous record was more than half a million dollars. In June, the new U.S. casino mark was assured, when Rivers’ bad-beat amount climbed past the Motor City Casino record.
The main factor in producing the record prize was the high threshold for cracking the prize, which required the loser’s hand to be at least quad tens, with both hole cards for both showdown players also involved in determining the hand. That quad-tens mark is much higher than a typical bad-beat jackpot, which usually requires any quads or a top full house such as jacks to qualify. 40% of the total went to Flanagan, whose quads suffered the bad beat, in this instance. Brodersen and his rivered royal flush got 30 percent of the money, while the rest went to the table’s other active players.
When the new record was guaranteed earlier this year, the Rivers Casino Poker Room Manager told a Pennsylvania-targeted outlet that the goal was to pay out “life-changing money.”
The assistant general manager at Rivers Casino Pittsburgh said that it was thrilling and potentially life-changing for a poker game. We don’t know when the bad-beat will hit or how big it will be. It is almost as exciting for us as it is for the winners.