News: How does post flop strategy change in a PKO?

What strategic adjustments should you make after the flop in Progressive Knockout Tournaments?

In the self study series Barry Carter shows you how he tried to solve a poker problem then consults a coach or solver to get feedback on his method.

I have been playing around with the new post flop ICM feature from GTO Wizard a lot lately, and an interesting hand I played came up.

It was early in a $109 PKO and I opened under the gun with 35bbs, and the BB with 30bbs called. The flop was 654 rainbow. The BB checked.

Because I have worked extensively with Dara O'Kearney I know this is the most common flop for the BB to lead out in a regular MTT. Indeed, when we plug it into GTO Wizard for a vanilla MTT, this is the BB first action:

The BB leads almost half the time, because they have all the straights, all the two pairs, all the sets and all the combo draws.

The hand didn't play out like this in real life, but I noted it because I was curious how this changes in a PKO. In this example, I covered the BB and they had a $75 immediate bounty (they had already busted a couple of players). I was very curious about how this hand differs in PKO world.

So as the covered player, this is what the BB does in the PKO:

Still a high lead frequency compared to most spots, but it has more than halved compared to a vanilla MTT. We should look at the response to the lead to see why. First in the vanilla MTT:

And then for the PKO:

At first glance, the strategy looks very similar. The folding range is about the same, however there is much more raising in the PKO example. The hands with very little equity get out of the way, but the hands with some equity want to get more money in right away, to win the bounty.

You can node lock with the post flop ICM feature at GTO Wizard, and I was curious what happens if you made the BB use the vanilla strategy of leading out 54.5% of the time in the PKO. This is what the BTN does in response to that:

In GTO world in the PKO the BTN folds 24.3% of the time. When we give the BB the leak of following a vanilla strategy, the BTN only folds 5.3% of the time. They mostly call in response, which surprised me because I assumed they would increase their raise frequency. The reason for this is that the BB folds more to the raise in the node locked example (34% of the time compared to 29% of the time) and raises more (15% of the time compared to 10% of the time). Neither of these things are good for when we are trying to win bounties, we want to keep them in the hand with weak holdings and not to force us to fold. The ideal situation is they call off against us.

Let's look at how the hand actually played and that was with a BTN check. First, this is what we do in vanilla world:

And then the PKO:

Again, at first glance, it looks the same. More hands bet in the PKO compared to check, most notably overpair hands like AA and KK, which check back to protect the range in the vanilla example.

The more notable difference is that the bet size increases. The 125% overbet is the favoured bet in the PKO compared to the 84% pot bet in the vanilla. This makes sense, again the BTN covers the BB so they want to get the stacks in as soon as possible to win the bounty.

I could go on but in the actual hand, I had an overpair and took it down with the first bet.

This example brought up some interesting lessons though. Covered players cannot play as aggressively in PKOs because they won't get folds. While calling ranges for covering players do not expand as much as I thought they would, the hands in the continue range get played more aggressively. Folds mostly stay folds in PKOs, but calls become raises a lot of the time. Finally, bet sizes tend to increase for covering players for the obvious reason of wanting to get the stacks in to win bounties.

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