Mystery Bounty MTTs

I've been playing more of these of late and accordingly studying them so I have some thoughts.

First thing of note: Mystery Bounty is a format that isn't really solved yet or totally understood, so even winning players can make mistakes bounty hunting.

Having gotten that out of the way...

The best way to think of a mystery bounty tournament is to calculate the average bounty and then use the buyin / starting stack to convert it to chips. I haven't played any live mystery bounties, but I assume they announce at some point when the bounties start paying and how many people entered / how much is in the bounty prize pool. Online, the tourney lobby always has the prize pool. Sometimes the bounties start when you reach the money, in which case they're easy to calculate in advance. Other times they start at a predetermined level (usually before the money), so you won't know how many bounties there are to win until then.

And then it's a matter of translating that into chips.

Say you are in a $50 Mystery Bounty online. 50/50 prize pool split between the regular prizes and the bounty prizes. 10,000 starting chips. 1000 entries, 150 paid, bounties start with 250 left.

So that's a $50,000 prize pool. Half the prize pool goes to bounties - $25,000. Bounties start with 250 left - the average bounty is $100, or two buyins. So you estimate that if you get a shorter stack all-in with a chance to win a bounty, that adds 20,000 chips of equity to the pot for you.

In my experience, most of the time at the start of the bounty period, the average is about 2.5-3 buyins, so in reality it may end up even more extreme. Also in my experience, the average bounty size changes surprisingly little throughout the tournament, unless a lot of the biggest bounties go early or are still around late.

The other thing is that you'll do the most gambling from an equity standpoint at the start of the bounty period-- the blinds are lowest and so the bounty equity represents the most big blinds. If the big blind is 2k when the bounty period starts, that means you can basically add 10BB to your equity / pot odds when calling a shorter stack's all in. So if you raise 2BB off say 25BB, and the SB shoves for 12BB, normally (keeping it simple with BBA here) you'd be calling 10BB to win 14BB. In this specific scenario where a bounty is worth 10BB of equity, you treat your calling range like you're calling 10BB to win 24BB. So where in a standard tournament you need 41.67% equity to break even by chip EV, in this bounty tournament you only need 29.41%!

Once you need that little equity to make a call profitable, you can call with nearly anything (and suited cards often add enough equity to make them part of "nearly anything"). If, say, you're in the BB and covering and the SB is sufficiently short (which is the average is big enough and it's early enough might even mean 8-10BB), you can profitably call with any two.

Of course, this calculus changes over the course of the tournament, not only because the average bounty will change, but because as the blinds go up, that bounty discount represents a smaller and smaller number of BB. (And then on top of that the increasing ICM pressure as you approach the final table, of course.)

Hope this helps.

And, aside, I'm pretty sure that T2s second call is not correct. Even the first one you can probably justify getting in on the flop with a flush draw and maybe say a backdoor straight draw if you're against the stack you cover. But I think once it gets around and the covering stack reshoves, you gotta fold. A hand like this doesn't have that much equity in this scenario, and like you mentioned, you're costing yourself future bounties in better situations. (This is definitely a format where there's a huge difference between covering and being covered when you're getting all-in.)

That said, even as the BB in this scenario, you can actually call wider than you might think, because the SB should be getting it in wider than they would otherwise, because of the bounties. T2s i still wouldn't because you're almost never ahead of anything the SB has here (maybe 98s-76s), but it might mean something like, say, KJs could be a call when it wouldn't otherwise.

I made a thread earlier about this, especially in these huge GG ones, seems like on beginning of day 2 (right at the start of itm and bounties) all the big stacks are vpiping >90% and these are guys with massive tourney wins not fishes (i think). Its only when there’s maybe 4% of the field left that their vpip goes back to normal.

I personally use Nath’s method for calculating the ev in these mystery bounties and maybe open wider if there are many shorties behind and im a healthy stack but i still dont feel opening 42o utg is a profitable play yet, however i could be wrong.

Thank you both!

Indeed, this was a GG tourney, 4.6 million prize pool, split 50 50 between normal prizes and bounties. Top bounty was 300k, and aprox 5 more bounties were above 100k. So obviously hitting one of those is a big score (this was a 54$ tournament, day 2 ITM, first pay out 76$ and payjump once a third of the field is gone at only 100$).

I agree on the suited part and thank you for providing the formula, it serves as a good orientation point.

I also think T2s was a bit reckless, and probably the KTo was borderline, I think KTs would be ok to take in that spot.

By $54 you mean $54+6?

Geez, how many people were in this and how many got paid? I'm curious how they made the biggest bounties so huge relative to the buyin. Was it just a ridiculously large field, or do they have a bunch of bounties much smaller than usual to make up for it, or what?

More like 24$ + 24$ +6$, so half the non rake buy in goes to bounty.

I think around 90k buy ins, multiple stage 1s going on for 2-3 weeks, one can join as many Stage 1s as they want and stacks get accumulated for Stage 2, which is ITM and mystery bounties start. There were around 11k in Stage 2.

I think from the 2.3 mn in bounties there was a 300k, 290k, 180k x 2 and 3 around 100k. Lowest bounty 24$. I think around 6.000 bounties were the lowest.