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This week, the World Poker Tour announced that its championship event would have a mystery bounty element to it. This would be in the form of $1 million in added mystery bounty prizes.

In less than a decade, the mystery bounty format has gone from being a niche side event to a bona fide second Main Event for a lot of tours. At the very least, most schedules make their Mystery Bounty tournament the second-biggest one on the schedule, with the most starting days.

Now we are seeing one of the most prestigious tournaments in poker add a mystery bounty element to it. Is it time to consider the Mystery Bounty a Main Event?

Strategically not a big difference

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It's quite a shock to see the WPT World Championship become anything other than a vanilla no-limit hold'em tournament. Until recently, at least, it was arguably the second most prestigious tournament in poker.

That's not to say this new format doesn't improve the event, just that it adds an element of novelty where it was previously never needed.

If you're particularly concerned about this ruining the prestige of the event, I wouldn't be too concerned. The Mystery Bounty element does not come out of the prize pool and, perhaps most significantly, will only make up a very small portion of the prizes.

Last year, the championship event had a prize pool of $18,277,000, and if it replicated its success this year, the Mystery Bounty element would only make up 5% of the overall prize pool. Most Mystery Bounty tournaments have a 50/50 split between bounties and normal payouts. I haven't done the solves yet, but strategically, this would not change your strategy much at all between a Mystery and the vanilla.

Customer service beats prestige

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So while the poker nerd in me has a slight bugbear about the prestige of this event, ultimately I think this is a good thing for the game. It's not going to change the strategy so dramatically that it turns the World Championship event into a crapshoot, and it has an added value element that nobody can deny. It's a much better added-value promotion than the WSOP Paradise bonus for WSOP Poker bracelet winners, which really only benefits a small pool of people.

Is the Mystery Bounty a new type of Main Event? The interesting thing about Mystery Bounty tournaments is how much derision they get from serious poker players, yet how popular they actually are. They're a bit like Coldplay. Nobody wants to admit to liking them, but somebody must do, because they fill out arenas. It's the extreme element of variance that gets serious players' backs up. Often it is the case that somebody who scraped through into the money takes home a bigger prize than somebody who makes the final table

I happen to like Mystery Bounty tournaments, not because of the chance to win a big bounty (but that would be nice one time, please), but because amateur players like it and most players make mistakes in them. I think customer service is more important than prestige where poker tournaments are concerned, and if this is what the market wants, then I am supportive of it. So while part of me pains for the good old days when the WPT World Championship was the second most prestigious event in poker, I am glad the WPT is taking risks and adding value.