Home Game Tutorial #5.5: Progressive and Mystery Bounties.

Progressive and Mystery Bounty tournaments are popular because they allow players to create big scores without having to win or place high in the tournament, and they reward aggression. I know I said it was unwise to host them, but that’s under the assumption that you have a single table. A progressive bounty is good for encouraging aggression if you have 3, 4, or even 5 tables, and a mystery bounty is good for high scores at that level. I recommend reading tutorial #5 to understand how a regular bounty works before diving into progressive and mystery ones.

Firstly, Progressive Bounties, or PKOs are when a player’s bounty increases based on how many people they’ve knocked out. If everyone starts with a $20 bounty, the first person to eliminate someone will get half of that, or $10, into their pocket, and the other $10 is added to their bounty, so it becomes $30. and if they are eliminated, their bounty is split up $15 and $15. The issue arises when many people are playing and eliminating each other. The math gets complicated in real-time, explaining why PKOs are reserved for online. The best solution is to hand out cash chips as bounty prizes, i.e. 4 $5 chips for a $20 bounty. When someone is eliminated, half the won chips go into their pocket and half go into their bounty. If they have an odd number of cash chips, the extra chip goes into the surviving player’s bounty. Finally, the winner of the tournament keeps all the bounty chips left in play.

Mystery bounties are different. In those, a portion of the buy-in goes to the mystery prize pool. At some point, usually at the money bubble, everyone has a bounty on their head, and eliminating them gets you a random prize out of the pot. In a $100 pool with 7 players cashing, one bounty might be worth $50, 2 worth $15, and 4 worth $5. And as per usual, the winner gets to open their own bounty.