Knockout Tournament Strategy
Knockout tournaments, or "bounty" tournaments, are becoming
increasingly popular in online poker. The premise is simple, your
buy-in is divided three ways: prize pool, bounty, and, of course,
rake. The prize pool and rake portions of the buy-in should be pretty
easy to understand since every tournament has them. What makes a
Knockout Tournament different is the bounty money. This is money that
is "put on your head", so to speak, and awarded to the player who
knocks you out of the tournament.
For example, a popular
online tournament at Full Tilt Poker has a buy-in of $24+$2. Of the
$24 buy-in, $20 is placed in the prize pool and $4 is used as a
bounty. This means you'll receive $4 for every player you knock out of
the tournament and whoever knocks you out of the tournament will
receive $4. If you happen to win the whole tournament, you'll get the
2nd place finisher's bounty as well as retain your own bounty money.
After all, no one knocked you out.
The introduction of the
bounty presents some necessary strategy adjustments that I want to
talk about in this article. In general, I observe players allowing the
presence of the bounty affect their decisions too much. In other
words, when a player moves all-in, they will call them with very
marginal holdings in hopes of busting them out and receiving their
bounty money. But remember, in almost all cases, the prize pool of the
tournament is far larger than the bounties. This means you should
essentially play the tournament like a normal tournament with a few
small strategy adjustments.
It is important to realize how
the bounty affects your decisions throughout the tournament. In the
early stages of the tournament, knocking a player out and receiving a
bounty carries more value than it does later in the tournament. This
is because at the start of the tournament, you're really not worth
that much. For example, if I buy into a $24+$2 bounty tournament, I
might estimate that I am worth $35 in that tournament. In other words,
right when I take my seat in that event, I expect to win an average of
$9 off of my initial tournament buy-in. So if I played the event
10,000 times, I would expect to cash for a gross total of $350,000
(including bounties), make sense? That's my "expected value".
In
any tournament, your "value" in the event changes as the tournament
drags on. So if I am "worth" $35 when I first take my seat, how would
my value change if I doubled-up or busted out on the first hand? Well,
if I busted out, I would obviously be worth $0 in the tournament. If I
doubled-up, I might estimate that I'm worth more like $70. Are you
still with me?
As you get deeper and deeper in a tournament and accumulate more and
more chips, your "worth" in the tournament continues to increase.
Suppose you make the final table. Now your "worth" in the tournament
is going to be
way more than the $35 it was at the beginning of
the tournament. It might now be worth a few thousand depending on how
large the prize pool is. A good way to determine how much you think
you're worth in any tournament is to ask yourself, "how much money
would I need right now to leave this tournament?" Then subtract like
10% since you're probably overestimating how much you would want due
to the entertainment value and crack-like addiction that comes from
going deep in a tournament.
Alright, back to how bounties
affect your decisions. Suppose you start with 3,000 chips. If the
bounty is 1/6th of the buy-in, then you should consider a bounty to be
worth 500 chips (3,000/6). In any bounty tournament, calculate how
many chips a bounty is worth by multiplying the total number of
starting chips with the bounty:total buy-in ratio. So if a $100 buy-in
tournament is $80 prize pool and $20 bounty and you receive 5,000
starting chips, you would take 5,000 and multiply it by 0.2 (2/10).
Once you have established how many chips a bounty is
worth, you can use this number to make decisions at the poker table.
Suppose the blinds are 50/100. You have 2,000 chips in the big blind.
It folds to the small blind who moves all-in for 1,500 chips. When
weighing whether or not to call, don't view the pot as having 1,600
chips, view the pot as having 2,100 chips (add 500 chips for the value
of the bounty) and make your decision based on those pot odds. It's
really as simple as that.
As you can see, making calls for
the purpose of receiving a bounty becomes a moot point later in the
tournament. When you're weighing whether or not to make a call in a
pot of 43,000 chips, the extra 500 added for the bounty value matters
only marginally. By the time you reach the final table, the bounties
should not even be a thought on your mind.
Good luck and
if you have any questions, feel free to start a thread in our poker
forums and I would be happy to answer!
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Ante Up Tourneys
