Mystery bounty tournaments are taking over poker, but there are many drawbacks to the format for both recreational players and professionals. [Image: Shutterstock.com]

Mystery bounty poker tournaments are becoming more prevalent, and it’s not difficult to see why. Recreational players seem to love them, and they produce big, exciting moments for social media clicks. Almost all online sites now offer them, and they’re taking up an increasing percentage of the live tournament schedule too.

However, mystery bounties may not be all they’re cracked up to be. Here are six reasons why we need less, not more, of this sort of thing.

Money leaves the ecosystem

Progressive knockout tournaments (PKOs) have been popular among operators because they tend to spread the tournament prize pool more thinly between different players. This keeps money circulating and the games going.

If the top bounty goes to a recreational player, it’s probably gone for good.

Mystery Bounties, by contrast, may not do this. Anyone who survives into the money has a reasonable change of taking the big bounty, with pros having a far more limited advantage compared to the likelihood of getting first place in a standard tournament. If the top bounty goes to a recreational player, it’s probably gone for good.

Late registration is too strong

Recreational players also suffer from the mystery bounty format. Amateur players tend to show up earlier to get the most playing time for their entry fee, but unlike normal PKOs, the format of mystery bounties encourages max late registration to get as close to the money as possible, when the whole prize pool is up for grabs.

On many sites, there isn’t even any thought allocated to the table draw for late registration, so all late-registering players get lumped on the same table together. This increases the incentive even further, since players are likely to have plenty of short stacks on their table who they cover and can win bounties from, even if they barely limp into the money.

Collusion is encouraged

If you know that late registering at the same time as someone else is likely to end up with you both on the same table, then why not try to grind it out until the money and get it all-in against each other?

tournament structures essentially made it possible to fold into the money with plenty of stalling

This behavior was absolutely rife on 888 Poker until recently, where unusual tournament structures essentially made it possible to fold into the money with plenty of stalling. Combined with a lack of table randomization, any two players could easily take a freeroll, having both earned the min-cash.

While you can’t fold into the money anymore, it’s enormously +EV for two players with the same stack to get it in with random cards against each other, just as it is in the early stages of a PKO. In mystery bounties, with late registration and shorter stacks, it’s much easier to do so. Where does the extra EV come from? Everyone else playing the tournament who isn’t colluding, of course.

They’re less secure

All poker tournaments, both live and online, have to take security seriously, and part of good security is minimizing your attack surface – the number of different parts of your operation that can potentially be exploited.

Online poker sites have verified RNGs, so this isn’t so much of a problem, although it does still expand that surface. For live poker, however, security is a bit different. We have regular dealer changes, players can spot marked cards, we can see the decks coming out, and we can observe what everyone at the table is doing.

This isn’t the case when you go up to collect a bounty. We haven’t seen the envelopes. We don’t know who put them in. We can’t really see if any of them are even marked. We haven’t had any major scandals or accusations yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

The donkey work

Even online this is a frustrating experience, particularly if you’re playing a full session with many tournaments on the go at once. Live, it’s a battle of constantly craning your neck to check the current bounties, and might require you to actually be constantly leaving your seat if you’re in a bad spot to view the board. 

Now, sure, poker is a game of math, but not like this. It doesn’t involve having to check the list and do arithmetic in your head every single time you make even a preflop decision. That gets very tiresome, very quickly.

It’s not the vibe

When we play a tournament, it’s in our interest that everyone else in the room does as badly as possible. It’s a competitive, fun, social endeavor. But when you’re opening a mystery bounty, every single person is actively rooting for you to get the minimum. That’s not fun. That’s like getting it in with Queens versus Ace-King and the entire tournament field surrounding your table, cheering for an ace. 

Finally, when someone does actually pull out the big bounty, instantly removing a quarter of the prize pool from the tournament, the atmosphere in the room instantly deflates. Everyone is dejected and tilted, and the mood quickly becomes dismal. That’s not fun, either.

One per series, as a novelty, is plenty.

It’s safe to say we’ll never get rid of mystery bounties entirely. But their current level of prominence is more than enough. One per series, as a novelty, is plenty. Somewhere in the status of a “Win the Button” tournament – a slight curiosity to give us something a little bit different. 

What we don’t want to see is them taking the sort of status that PKOs have, where it becomes half of the schedule run by online operators and is regularly the format for flagship events like Sunday majors.

Perhaps at this point we should consider a radical model, and award the most money to the player who actually wins the damn thing.