poker

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

It's quite a big shock to see such a prestigious event essentially become a mystery bounty, but as I wrote earlier this week, it wouldn't change the strategy too much. The reason being that the $1 million in added prizes is not as big a proportion of the prize pool as a typical mystery bounty is. If this year's event is close to last year's event, the $1 million will be roughly 5% of the prize pool, whereas in a traditional mystery bounty, the bounties are usually 50% of the prize pool.

Today I wanted to give a quick example of how significant the strategy change would be.

Add 5% to the prize pool

This is a very easy thing to solve for using a preflop solver. What I did as a toy game example was run one solve for after the bubble in a 1,000-runner vanilla tournament. Then I did the exact same thing, but gave everybody a bounty, which, when you add them up, added 5% to the prize pool.

This is the way to approach mystery bounty tournaments. You have to base your actions on the average value of a bounty rather than the biggest bounty in play.

The first thing to look at is the Risk Premiums. On the left, we have the Risk Premiums for the normal vanilla tournament, and on the right, we have them with the extra 5% added to the prize pool in the form of bounties. You can also see the stacks of the players in the boxes below.

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don't get too bogged down by the numbers, especially if this is something you're not familiar with. Just look at the colours. It, for the most part, looks broadly the same, with the exception that the risk premiums are very low against short-stack players. This is because we can win their bounty, and we have an extra incentive to get all in with them.

Now let's pick an opening range at random. This is the BTN range when it's folded to them. They have an average stack at the table and cover one player acting after them. Again, the vanilla tournament is on the left, and the money-added mystery bounty is on the right. As you can see, the range is barely different between the two. There is only 4% between them.

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So, not much difference there, but this one is different. Below is the BB calling range when the short-stacked SB shoves.

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This time, we widen our range from 29% of hands to 45% of hands. This goes back to what we observed with the Risk Premiums, and that is that they get much wider when we are up against a short-stacked player whose bounty we can easily win.

It appears, then, that the adjustment to play in this tournament is to just be a tiny bit wider than we normally would be, but when we have the opportunity for an easy bounty, we should take it quite liberally. What might make the event even better value is the amount of players who overadjust for the bounties, and we could see some wild gambling that's completely unnecessary come December