How to play with a mega bounty on the table
What should your strategy be if the prize for a guest bounty at your table is significantly bigger than any other prize? Dara O'Kearney has the answer.
Over the weekend PokerStars put on a $55 tournament where 10 of their professional players had $20,000 bounties on their heads.
$20,000 is bigger than most first prizes in tournaments much bigger than a $55 entry fee so it goes without saying if you found yourself at a table with one of these players you should be very excited.
While we might never see a bounty of that relative magnitude on a starting table again, there are plenty of MTTs where a 'guest bounty' has a prize on their head that is equivalent or better than the main prize on offer.
A few people reached out to ask me of how to adjust here because I have written a book on PKOs. So how do you play in them if you get drawn at their table?
First and foremost, this is a 'call everything' spot if you have a chance at the bounty. If they shove and three players call them, you should be happy to put your chips in with 7-2 offsuit. No matter how dominated you are, you will always have enough equity to call when you can 10x, 100x or 500x your buy-in.
Focus on covering the bounty
You should enter every pot they enter and not fold unless they do. Every hand you play is going to be a gazillion times more profitable when the mega bounty is in the pot.
Beyond that you should focus on making sure you cover them, because that is the only way you can bust them. If they are not involved in the current hand you should avoid high variance moves that might make you short stacked if they go badly. There are a lot of profitable spots you should pass to make sure you cover them, similar to how you often have to pass profitable spots on the bubble.
If you do not cover them, you have to take some risks to try and boost your stack. This player will not last long at the table if everyone else is playing right so you can't wait for a good spot. If the bounty is out of the hand you might be able to exert a pseudo bubble pressure on other players who would also want to avoid not being able to cover them.
As important as it is to have a big covering stack, you should also avoid busting other players at the table. Chips will be flying around quite wildly, the problem with that is if you quickly bust two or three players the table might get broken up and the mega bounty might get moved elsewhere.
The final advice is more mental game than strategy and that is to simply recognise you are in a different sort of game now, it's not about the final table anymore it's all about the bounty. If you bust out calling a six way all-in with a low equity hand but the mega bounty was all-in too, you played the hand perfectly.
Dara O'Kearney's new book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is out now.
