Aces vs. Kings: Megabeat Edition

I’ve done a couple of recent posts about pocket Aces vs pocket Kings (aka, the dreaded pocket Kings) (see here and here).   But now Las Vegas is all abuzz about the most extreme example that occurred just yesterday.

I wasn’t part of the hand, in fact, I was in my room, asleep at the time it occurred.  But the hand that hit CET’s Megabeat Jackpot for the second time since it started (see here for the first time) started as one of those classic Aces vs Kings confrontations.

It happened at Planet Hollywood (again) on Wednesday morning, around 7:30 AM.  In a 1/2 NL game, both players got it all in preflop and tabled their cards.

The flop came AAK.  Imagine being the player with the Kings, flopping a Kings full of Aces boat and knowing you’ve already lost the hand?  I don’t know anyone who could have such bad luck with pocket Kings.  Oh wait….I do know one such person….yours truly.  But even your humble blogger has never lost with the dreaded hand in that horrific fashion.

Reports are that when the turn was the case King, the guy with the Kings full didn’t realize that he had just won the Megabeat.  I’m not sure if he didn’t know about the Bad Beat Jackpot, or if he just wasn’t thinking about it at the time.  Anyway, everyone at the table screamed at the turn card, and he must have been thinking, “Oh wow, that just makes the bad beat worse, I didn’t just have my Kings full lose to quads, I had my quads lose to quads!”

I’m sure it didn’t take long to explain to him that, while he had lost the pot, he had won a huge cash prize.  In fact, his takeaway for the hand was a cool $183K, give or take a few bucks. The guy who flopped quad Aces took home $91K, in addition to the pot.  Because it occurred so early on a weekday morning, very few people were playing poker at a CET property then, so everyone who was received nearly $6K….even if they were miles from where the bad beat hit.  The jackpot had risen to over $900K when it hit. 

I was of course interested when I heard about it hitting, both as a poker player and as a guy who writes a column for Ante Up.  Yes, this will be mentioned in my next column.  But when I heard that it was quad Aces over quad Kings, I couldn’t help but think about the recent blog posts I’ve done on those two pocket pairs running into each other.

Then I thought….hey, how is it possible that I wasn’t the guy with the Kings?  It seemed like a natural for me.  Until I realized that it couldn’t have happened to me.  Because in this case, losing with the dreaded pocket Kings wasn’t a bad beat…..it was a freakin’ awesome beat.