Chip management in bounty tournaments
Whether it is a PKO or a Mystery Bounty tournament, Dara O'Kearney says you should be prioritising covering players to win bounties.
Covering other players is your priority in a bounty tournament. If you are the shortest stack at the table then there is a significant percentage of the prize pool that is off-limits to you. If you cover everyone on your table, every spot is more profitable to the point that it justifies you playing a very wide range aggressively.
Therefore you should adjust your strategy to make sure you cover players. This is what we call chip management in poker. It includes doing things like:
- Not passing profitable spots as the short stack because you need to take risks to cover people
- Passing marginal spots as a chip leader to maintain covering everybody
- Taking high variance lines if it means you might cover several more people
To highlight this, I found a random screenshot of a poker table (it's actually the online WSOP Main Event from 2020 but let's pretend it's any bounty tournament). Each player should have a different strategy to maximise their chances of winning bounties:
B Alburquerque is the chip leader and wants to enjoy his lead over the rest of the table. He therefore wants to avoid marginal spots vs Robocup and Salas. If he played for stacks and lost against those two, he would no longer cover everyone, he would only cover six players. It is much easier to pass close spots against the other two big stacks and use his big stack to mop up the other six players.
By the same token, Robocup and Salas should avoid each other and B Alburquerque. Losing a big confrontation would see them eliminated or close to it. There are six other players they can easily win the bounty of, there is no need to tangle with each other.
If this were a regular MTT then the advice for the middle stacks is usually to avoid high variance spots if they were close to the money. You have everything to lose and not much equity to gain as a middle stack. Here though the opposite is true. blackfortuna, riza, mickey mouse & fullbabyfull are all medium stacks and it would behoove them to look for a high-variance-but-profitable-spot to get their money in (something like check/raising all-in with a drawing hand against another medium stack or the chip leaders). If mickey mouse, for example, doubled up against B Alburquerque it is very likely he would cover everyone at the table (his stack would go up to around 7 million and B Alburquerque would go down to about 7 million).
uncletoni & fish3098 are the two short stacks and they essentially cover nobody at the table. They need to change that quickly, they can’t hang around like short stacks do in regular MTTs stealing one blind per orbit. Playing tight means missing out on bounties, so it might actually make sense for these two players to take slightly minus EV gambles because the upside of winning means covering other players. They certainly should not be passing any profitable spots.
Chip management is something lots of players do not understand, which is why you see them play too tight as the short stack or take needless risks as the big stack. Chip management is part science, part art. It should factor into every decision in a PKO or bounty tournament.
Dara O'Kearney's new book GTO Poker Simplified is out now.
