Party bad beat jackpots

[nut case ace]

For those of you who don't know, party poker offers bad beat jackpot holdem tables. The jackpots sometimes get quite large so i was wondering at what point do the tables yield a +EV. To clarify, for every hand that sees a flop, there is 50 cents taken out and added to the jackpot. Furthermore, each time the jackpot is hit, 10% of the pot is retained by party poker as an "administrative fee". My question is, what amount does the jackpot have to be at for it to be even money or better to play the tables? The qualifying scenario for the JP to hit is quad eights or better getting beaten and both the winner and the loser must play both cards. Anyone know how to do the math to figure this one out? Thanks for the help.

[Paul2432]

I don't believe it is possible to calculate the frequency with which the JP will hit. One problem is that it depends in part on how people play.

However, it can be determined empirically by watching how often it hits. My informal observation is that it hits around once every 200,000 hands.

Playing the JP tables becomes +EV whenver

JP > (0.5 / 0.7 )*(# hands between hits)

Note that the fact that a tight player is somewhat less likely to hit the JP is offset by the fact that the tight player will pay a smaller share of the JP drop.

Paul

[nut case ace]

Yeah, i was thinking the same thing about how it depends on your style of play. I play fairly tight, so i'm going to hit it somewhat less frequently than a lot of the fishier players. For instance, i'm not about to call 3 bets preflop with 88 or 99 or something so i might miss out on my woulda-been quads getting beaten some infinitesimally small amount of time. However, even the players who got dealt into the hand get a portion of the JP, so that evens that edge somewhat.

That said, i have a couple questions for you. where did you get the number 200,000 and how confident are you that it's anywhere close to the real number? Is it possible that it's more like 1,000,000? and obviously it's going to vary and sometimes it could be 5 hands between hitting, etc, but i'm just looking for the average. Also, where did the (.5/.7) come from?

Thanks for the response.

[Paul2432]

I got the 200,000 by watching the amount when the JP hit. It seemed to me that on average, the JP value increased by around $75,000 between hits. That would take 150,000 hands with a JP drop which I figured was around 200,000 hands overall. I could be off by 50,000 hands or even 100,000 hands, but I am fairly sure that it is not 1,000,000 hands. If that were the case JPs over $500,000 would be routine and JPs over $1,000,000 would not be uncommon.

Note that I am referring the number of hands for a table to hit the JP, not for a player.

I figure before the next hand is dealt each table has an equity in the JP equal to:

(size of JP)*0.7 / (# of hands between hits)

The 0.7 factor is used because only 70% of the JP is awarded (20% to next JP, 10% to Party Poker)

I figure playing is +EV if this JP share is greater than the JP rake of 0.5. Setting up the inequality and solving for JP gives the equation in my previous post.

Paul

[BluffTHIS!]

I have another informal observation as well. When the jp really gets up there and is hit, it will often if not always be hit twice again in relatively short period thus sending it to a very small start point again. Then the build up to another biggie.

Though some might say it was 'overdue', we of course know that that the frequency of hits are non-dependent events, and thus each is an independent trial. Furthermore, since PP gains 10% of each jp, they gain nothing by tinkering since that 10% overall will be the same regardless of how often and at what amount a jp may be hit. The only possible gain would be a publicity one with big jp's, with the 2 smaller hits thus not making people think they were being hit entirely too infrequently.

However, I believe the explanation for how big they become is simply that when they get to a certain level, a herd of 15-30 rocks flocks to the 3-6 tables to try to benefit. Of course as the other poster noted, they themselves will be much less likely to hit it as they will not play a lot of suited connectors or pocket pairs like 88/99 facing one or two raises. Thus their only win comes from being at the same table when someone else hits, in which case their payday even on big jp is fairly small, and hardly worth the effort considering the odds against, unless the games are so good as to make a profit anyway. But of course they are not good since it is populated by players like themselves.

[bobbyi]

On their page abot party poker, bonuswhores has a chart answering this question:
http://www.bonuswhores.com/party-poker.php
I have no idea how they came up with those numbers. I'm suspicious that they just assume that everyone always goes to a showdown, in which case you'll need to fudge their numbers way up since in practice people will sometimes fold a hand that would have hit the jackpot.