As in all MTTs, the very big money resides at the final table, and so jeopardising your chances of a top five finish in order to collect a few tournament buy-ins from a bounty can be a grave mistake. You are entitled to half of that if you successfully bust someone, and so, on average, you get $45 now instead of $10 for eliminating an opponent.īut watch out, there is also a big downside to bounty hunting too aggressively in the later stages. As there are 100 players left, each player has, on average, $90 extra on their bounty by this point. A whopping $9,000 has, therefore, been added to the bounties of other players since the start of the tournament. Each one has contributed 25% of the buy-in or $10 to the bounty of whoever knocked him out. That is 900 opponents who have been eliminated.

Imagine that the field originally contained 1000 runners and you find yourself with a healthy stack with only 100 players left. Since bounties are progressive in these events, it is well worth going after them when they have had a chance to ramp up. Getting through the bubble into the money remains the number one goal.īounties increase in the late game, but beware, so does your risk! While the expected value of going all-in early on in a coin-flip situation is a bit higher than in a standard tournament, it is lower in a progressive knockout than in a regular knockout as you win 25% of a buy-in as opposed to 50%. Avoid risking large portions of your stack early on without a clearly favorable investment. The big money still resides in the deeper stages of the event and survival is still your utmost priority for that reason. Knocking someone out early on will provide a boost to your bankroll in the form of 25% of the tournament buy-in, but this is a microscopic fragment of the overall prize pool. The other half attaches to your own bounty, meaning that: the more players you eliminate, the bigger a target you become.

The progressive element comes in because when you eliminate another player, you only get half of his bounty in winnings. A Progressive KO (Knockout) tournament is one in which half of your buy-in goes to the overall prize pool to be paid out like a normal tournament, while the other half constitutes your bounty.

Pokerstars progressive knockout