party poker badbeat jackpot

[slimshaggy]

can anyone give an analysis on how big the jackpot would have to be in order to justify playing ANY straight flush draw preflop (even a 3 gapper) in light of the odds of someone else having a staight flush or quad 8's or better in the same hand?

[Grendel]

Pretty effing huge.

The mathematical analysis is driving me bonkers. If nobody has an answer, I might just break down and write a simulation.

-Grendel

[MortalWombatDotCom]

[ QUOTE ]
can anyone give an analysis on how big the jackpot would have to be in order to justify playing ANY straight flush draw preflop (even a 3 gapper) in light of the odds of someone else having a staight flush or quad 8's or better in the same hand?

[/ QUOTE ]

it depends on so many things. how -EV are those hands to begin with? what hands are your opponents playing, and how are they playing them? are you only playing those hands if someone raises (suggesting a bad beat is more likely)? do you limp in and hope someone will play a hand like 88 or 99 without raising? if you need quad 8s or better, playing 63s
is a lot less likely to hit the jackpot than 74s... do you really mean all suited cards that stretch, or do you want a threshhold at which to start playing each hand? or do you want the probability that your 42s will get involved in a bad beat when pitted against some number of randomly selected hands?

[slimshaggy]

what is the magic number that would make calling any possible straight flush hand preflop correct, not considering any other variables other than the possibilty of another bad beat hand and board?

[MortalWombatDotCom]

[ QUOTE ]
what is the magic number that would make calling any possible straight flush hand preflop correct, not considering any other variables other than the possibilty of another bad beat hand and board?

[/ QUOTE ]

$147,562.87

[elitegimp]

I was thinking about this last night, and here are some of my thoughts:

suppose you hold 74s -- to be eligible for the bad beat jackpot, you need one of the following final boards (assuming both you and your opponent need to use both hole cards, so the board being AoAs2s3s5s isn't a bad beat even if your opponent has AA):

356xx
568yy

where xx and yy are one of the following:
AA
KK
QQ
JJ
TT
99
88

you could also hit if yy is
8x
JT
QT
QJ
(assuming all these cards are your suit).

So there are 14 final boards (out of C(50,5) = 2118760) that qualify you for 25% of the jackpot provided your opponent has a specific 2 card hand, 1 final board that qualifies you for 25% of the jackpot if your opponent has 8x and x>=9 (24 hands), and 3 final boards that qualify you for 50% of the jackpot if your opponent again holds precisely the right pocket cards.

Therefore, if you see the hand out to the end you have a 38 in 2097572400 chance of winning 25% of the jackpot, and a 3 in 2097572400 chance of winning 50% of the jackpot, for an EV of 0.00000000524*whatever the jackpot is. Therefore, in 50c/$1, if you are going to pay 50c to see the flop and then let it get checked to the river in hopes of a bad beat, by my calculations the jackpot needs to be almost $95.4 million to make it a +EV play.

Of course, this assumes that you never win a pot with 74s, an assumption that may or may not be valid considering how many favorable flops will come that will be bet, only to have you not hit the jackpot.

Word of warning: I didn't think through the post before typing... all the math was done while at the keyboard. If something looks way out of place (or even slightly out of place) please let me know.

edit: and 25s would be a better hand to play, because you can win on boards like AA34A if your opponent holds Ax and x>4, giving you many more ways to hit. Since I'm lazy and still not 100% sure my logic above is correct, I'm not going to venture a guess as to how much this lowers the min Jackpot standards.

edit 2: forgot about the 8x hands on an 56888 board, so maybe the previous edit abour 25s is false

[Cobra]

I found this web site. Brian Alspach has decided to try and solve this problem. The answer is 20 pages long. Go to the last page for the answer.

http://www.math.sfu.ca/~alspach/comp46.pdf

[Big_Jim]

"Thus, a bad-beat qualifying semideal is unlikely under these rules."

Hahaha, no joke.