One of the most popular types of poker tournaments to play today is the bounty format. Bounty tournaments are a bit different to standard MTTs in that they’re not really interested in who wins first place, but instead reward players for knocking out their opponents. These kind of tournaments can be great fun to play and are a good way to get some fast action in.
Bounty tournaments reward players for eliminating other players in the tournament, and usually this is done by paying a cash price over and above the player’s buy-in. This can be a fixed price or can vary depending on the tournament, and it’s almost always in cash rather than in tournament currency. This type of tournament is growing in popularity and it’s something that you can find online from some of the larger poker sites.
When playing a bounty tournament, you need to change your tactics slightly from those that you’d normally use in a regular MTT. This is because bounties are a big draw to lesser players who may not be capable of making it to the final table. This means that there are more gamblers in the tournament and this often leads to hands being played a lot looser than would be the case in a normal MTT.
The other key difference is that when you’re deciding to call a hand in a bounty tournament you have to think about more than just the amount of money that you’ll win if you make the call. You also need to consider the future value of the bounties on the heads of your opponent’s as well.
This is why it’s so important to be able to calculate what each bounty is worth in terms of chips. If you can work out this then you’ll have a much better chance of winning the most bounties possible and thus having a much bigger payout.
Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate how this works. Say that the player on the button is all-in for 3,000 chips and Hero is in position. He’s calling this because he has bounties on his head and this is helping him out, but he still needs to be aware of how many chips he needs to win the pot.
There are a lot of mistakes that can be made when playing in a bounty tournament, but one of the most costly is failing to understand how much each player’s bounties are actually worth. By learning how to do this then you can ensure that your decisions are made with the best interests of your own bankroll in mind.
