Congrats to Jade Lane for "winning" the $800+K bad beat jackpot last week - his quad tens was worth a cool $286K.  And M/TClark was also at the table, and got $29K.  Since then, I think the BBJ got hit two more times, so it got to about $10K. That got me to thinking about the BBJ's effect on the games.

On a previous post, I showed why overall, the BBJ was +EV for me, and for most other full ring regs.  However, when the BBJ is close to zero, you are basically paying around an extra 45% more in rake.  Now we're talking about something equivalent to playing on PokerStars.fr or PokerStars.it, except there aren't that many French or Italian fish.  CQLB?!?  (that's WTF?!? in French)  Is this really how I want to spend a few free hours?  And it's not going to give the casual player any additional incentive to play.  Altho I suppose the fish may be so clueless, they may think $10K is still a lot of money.

Someone on 2+2 had estimated the average BBJ jackpot before it hits is going to be around $250K.  Empirically, that seems about right, but I'll ask the Merge folks at some point for some more BBJ data (whenever I get around to sending the email and whenever they get around to answering it).  So when the BBJ is around $500K, you are getting about a 50% reduction in rake paid (after factoring in your ev of the BBJ).  Considering you can get almost 50% of your rake back, that's like playing RAKE FREE!  That just makes it super-enticing for a high volume reg to play.

Unfortunately, now, the opposite is true, so not only will this be unattractive to fish, it will also drive out all the meh regs (who know that they are meh regs).  Because the rake structure on the small stakes games are really hard to beat if there are few fish or many regs.  The rake alone at NL100 is around 20ptbb for a full ring table, and add another 9ptbb for the BBJ.  If you are sitting at a table full of regs, you have to be pretty delusional to think that your awesome poker skill is going to make up the 29ptbb the table has to pay to the casino.

For me, it's not like I had ever seen a red cent off of the BBJ in the past, and I was still able to make money.  So it's not like I *NEED* the BBJ to play.  It just makes it less exciting and more of a "grind" because of the huge cost structure involved.  But don't despair.  It seems to me that a majority of the 6max games are non-BBJ.  And I think any well-rounded poker player needs to know how to play both games.  So give that a try when the BBJ is super-low.