In recent years in poker, adding various bounties in multi-table tournaments has become increasingly popular. Regular bounties, where you earn money every time you knock a player out throughout the tournament, have been around for decades, but newer bounty rules and variations with bigger payouts have been slowly taking over at live casinos and in online poker rooms. Learn more below.
What is a bounty in Poker
In a normal poker tournament, when you knock another player out of the tournament, all you get is the chips that they had to start the hand. In a bounty tournament, you will receive a cash prize on top of the chips from your opponent. The size of the prize will depend on the buy-in of the event, and how much of the buy-in goes towards the bounty portion of the prizepool. Usually, the bounty is around a quarter of the buy-in, so for a live $400 buy-in, the bounty would usually be $100. Recently at the WSOP, the Super Turbo Bounty Event had a $1,500 buy-in, and each bounty earned $300.
This format has primarily been used in Texas Hold’em, and also in Pot-Limit Omaha, both live and online. However, as is often the case, things change over time, and bounties in poker have changed as well.
Different types of bounty events
We have already discussed a normal bounty event. Now let’s take a look at some other formats that are quickly taking over the live and online poker market.
- Big bounty – Big bounty events are similar to traditional bounties, except that the bounty is usually worth more, often half the buy-in. So in these events, a $1,000 buy-in with a big bounty would likely see $500 for each bounty. This, of course, drives more action, as big stacks will be more likely to call with marginal hands because of the tempting financial gains.
- Mystery bounty – Mystery bounties are newer to live and online poker, but have quickly gained popularity throughout the poker scene. For these specific events, the bounties don’t start until players are in the money. At that point, every time a player scores a knockout, they will draw a random bounty. This could range from $100 on the low end, to $25,000 for the top, or in some cases that you will see later in this piece, much, much more.
- Progressive bounty – Another bounty format quickly growing in popularity is Progressive Bounties. Unlike the Mystery Bounty rules, these bounties kick in from the start. Half the bounty goes to the player's overall bank, while the other half goes towards their bounty total that will be won by their opponent were they to be knocked out. Websites like GGPoker and AmericasCardroom have run entire series using this format, and they also run several of them a day in their regular multi-table tournament schedules. The ACR PKO series ran for two weeks, and gave out over $10,000,000 in prize money.
How bounties affect play
Poker is already a game that rewards aggression, and that is even more true in bounty tournaments, because with every knockout, the player gets closer to either freerolling the event, or even locking up a profit before they hit the money if they are able to secure enough bounties.
Bounties also severely affect the short stack’s strategy, because other opponents will be especially keen on trying to take their final chips for the added prize involved. As a result, short stacks especially don’t want to get severely short (5 big blinds or fewer) because some players will call their shoves with any two cards. So you want to shove at least 10 big blinds, and sometimes even bigger, in order to dissuade the big stacks from calling lighter. This is even more true in Progressive Bounty Events. If a player has a high number on their bounty, the ranges players will be calling with will be much wider, so you may be more incentivized to shove more big blinds with small to medium pairs (44-88) that can often dominate light calls like weak aces and low suited connectors.
The biggest bounties ever
As is usually the case, the WSOP is home to the biggest record when it comes to a bounty event. For two years straight, the WSOP has handed out a Mystery Bounty worth a cool $1,000,000. This year, they were even able to hand out two, along with a $500,000, and $250,000.
Other bounty events at the Wynn and EPT Barcelona have handed out $250,000 bounties before, and online the biggest bounty was also $1,000,000 on GGPoker in August of 2022. That event also had a guarantee of $10,000,000, one of the biggest in online poker history.
With the incredible numbers seen for Mystery Bounty Events at live tournaments in America and Europe in recent years, and the vast increase of Progressive Bounty Events online, it seems like bounties are only becoming more and more prominent in the MTT scene. Because of that, it’s more important now than ever to do a deep dive into bounty poker strategy to maximize your EV at the tables.