You can't time the Mystery Bounty

Dara O'Kearney puts to bed the idea that there is a better time than others to pull a ticket in a Mystery Bounty tournament.

Most Mystery Bounty tournaments allow you to collect your bounties as soon as you have eliminated a player. You can go straight away or you can hoard your tickets and take them all at once.

One of the most frequent things I get asked by poker players about this format is when to pull the bounty ticket. Everyone has established their own pet theories about when to pull the ticket. Most believe that it is better to go and get their ticket right away while they know the big bounty is still in play, but a few others think that waiting until a portion of the field has busted means you have fewer players between you and the big prize.

Neither of those theories, or anything in-between, is correct. When to pull the ticket is a neutral EV proposition.

My elevator pitch answer to this question is as follows. If 100 players were in the bounty portion of the tournament and nobody opened their envelopes until the tournament was over, your chances of winning the big prize are 100-1 for each elimination you made. There is no difference between this scenario and a regular Mystery Bounty tournament, except for the illusion of control humans have in the second situation.

A neutral EV proposition

If that does not convince you, consider this toy game example.

There are three envelopes, one has $100 in it and the other two have nothing in them.

Sophie, Jim and Carlos take turns picking a ticket. After which they take turns to open them.

Sophie goes first and her chances of winning the big prize are 33.33%. This should make intuitive sense to all of you. 

Jim goes second and 66% of the time he has a 50% chance of winning (33.33% of the time he is drawing dead because Sophie has already picked the right ticket). 66% x 50% = 33.33%.

Carlos goes last and he has a 33.33% chance of winning because 66.66% of the time one of the other two has already won it instead.

Even if you gave one of them the freedom to pick who gets which ticket and the order in which they draw them, they still only have a 33.33% chance of winning.

And that, my fellow nerds, is the closest we will ever come to using the Monty Hall Problem in a poker decision.

Don't sacrifice EV picking your envelope

Given that picking the ticket is a neutral EV gamble, the best advice I can give is to not sacrifice EV when you go to pick your ticket. What I mean by that is I see a lot of players jump up from their seats when they eliminate a player to pick their ticket, and in doing so they potentially miss out on some profitable spots.

If you are at a soft table you shouldn’t leave because you might miss out on an opportunity to win another bounty. In particular, if there is a short-stacked player at the table you should not miss a hand because you could miss out on an easy bounty. Don’t leap from your chair if it means you miss your Button, and definitely don’t go for your bounty ticket while you are in the blinds yourself.

Finally, now we have cleared this up, pay attention to table talk when this comes up. It is a clear sign of a weak player if they bring up having a winning system for pulling the bounty.

Dara O'Kearney's new book GTO Poker Simplified is out now.