Open any tournament lobby of an online poker site, and you’ll discover dozens of knockout (KO) games to choose from. Most knockout games fall into one of three categories: standard knockouts (SKO), progressive knockouts (PKO), and mystery bounties. Each of these three KO formats requires a different approach from the other to extract the maximum value from them, which is why our friends at GTO Wizard have provided PokerNews readers with a strategy guide for knockout poker tournaments.
Standard Knockout Tournament Strategies
Standard knockout (SKO) tournaments mostly run in the live poker world, although some online poker sites occasionally offer them. Typically, half of the overall prize pool is allocated to the bounty prize pool, and you win a fixed amount for every opponent you eliminate.
You must be aware that ICM causes a bounty’s value to decrease as chip values increase. This effect is magnified in SKO tournaments compared to progressive knockouts because the PKO’s average bounty value increases over time.
In SKO tournaments, you should aggressively bounty hunt during the tournament’s early stages because the starting bounties convert to a higher bounty power than those in a PKO tournament. Bounty Power is how GTO Wizard converts the dollar value of a bounty to a chip value or vice versa.
The “Fake All-In”; Why Do Players Do It?
The bounty power formula measures the power of the chips you control relative to the remaining prize pool. That formula is Total Chips in Play / (Remaining Bounty Pool + Remaining Prize Pool). You can delve deeper into bounty power in GTO Wizard’s Theory of Progressive Knockout Tournaments article.
Conversely, the chip values of standard bounties decrease as you approach the money place of a tournament and do so more rapidly. With that in mind, you can use the PKO solutions available in GTO Wizard as a starting point for your hand ranges, which will be closer to an ICM-focused strategy in the latter tournament stages.
Progressive Knockout Strategies
Progressive knockout (PKO) tournaments are the most popular format of the three this article discusses, but they are also the most complex due to the variable bounty sizes. In a PKO, half of the buy-in goes into the regular prize pool, with the remaining 50% split equally among all the entrants in the form of a bounty. Eliminate an opponent to receive half of their bounty as a prize, with the remaining half increasing the bounty on your head, making you a more attractive target.
It’s worth noting that the champion of a PKO tournament receives the bounty on the head of the runner-up plus the bounty on their head.
Master the Art of Progressive Knockout (PKO) Poker Tournaments
The GTO Wizard boffins suggest you should play a wider range of hands when your stack covers your opponent’s, but tighten up if you are covered. The effect of having more or fewer chips than your opponents is magnified in PKOs, and the effect becomes more pronounced as the gap between stack sizes increases.
Another tip GTO Wizard suggests is realizing you don’t always need to isolate when facing an open or a shove. Playing passively encourages more covered players to enter the pot preflop when they would ordinarily fold to aggression.
Additionally, if you are short-stacked, consider raising to a non-all-in amount to limit the action. Leaving a chip or two behind can prevent other players from calling because they cannot win your bounty if you are not at risk of elimination.
The mathematicians at GTO Wizard have compiled a couple of more tips in this handy video.
Mystery Bounty Tournament Strategy
Mystery bounty tournaments are all the rage online and live right now. They distribute their prize pools using 50% of the tournament’s buy-in for the regular prize pool and the other 50% for the bounty prize pool. However, the bounty prize pool is divided up and placed into separate envelopes, either real or virtual, and those bounties are not equal in value. Some are only worth half a buy-in, with others worth up to 1,000 times the buy-in.
The mystery bounties usually come into play once a specific blind level is reached or the money bubble bursts.
These tournaments have the highest variance in win rate of all bounty tournaments and appeal to players who want to gamble for a big win rather than playing their way to one.
GTO wizard suggests that mystery bounty players are incentivized to collect chips and build their stacks before the bounties are in place. This ensures they have the chance to open as many bounties as possible.
Once the tournament reaches the money place, it is possible to calculate the value of each bounty in terms of big blinds using the following calculation:
Bounty value in big blinds = (((current bounty prize pool/number of players remaining)/Buy-in) x Starting stack)/big blind in chips.
That may seem complicated, but you can easily create the formula in an Excel spreadsheet for easy access.
For example, in a mystery bounty tournament costing $110 to enter, which has a $500,000 prize pool ($250,000 in the regular and $250,000 in the bounty prize pools), a $50,000 starting stack, 1,200 in-the-money players, and blinds of 2,500/5,000, each bounty is worth 19 big blinds.
((($250,000/1,200)/$110) x 50,000)/5,000 = 19 big blinds
In this scenario, if a player shoves for five big blinds, by calling, you are risking five big blinds to potentially win approximately 26 big blinds, including blinds and antes. It should be obvious that your calling and shoving ranges when you cover your opponents should be incredibly wide.
However, you must be aware that if the larger mystery bounties are no longer available to win, the bounty value in big blinds drastically reduces. Therefore, your calling and shoving range returns to relative normality.
Put This Information to the Test
Every online poker site worth its salt offers knockout tournaments in some way, shape, or form. PokerStars has a massive selection of PKO and mystery bounty events, as does 888poker where mystery bounty tournaments dominate the schedule.
Good luck out there, and happy hunting.
Senior Editor