In a standard bounty tournament a slice of each buy-in sits on each player's head and goes to whoever eliminates them. A mystery bounty keeps the slice but hides its size: knockouts from a set point in the tournament, usually once the field is in the money, earn a draw from a pool of sealed envelopes ranging from a token amount to a headline prize that can rival first place. BSOP Millions advertises an envelope worth R$1,000,000; most WPT and WSOP festivals now run at least one.
An unopened envelope is worth the bounty pool divided by the number of envelopes. If a third of a $1,100 buy-in goes to bounties and 1,000 players enter, the pool is $333,000 and, spread across 1,000 envelopes, each draw is worth $333 on average before you see it. The headline envelope changes the variance of that draw, not its mean.
That average is the number to play by. A knockout worth $333 on average changes the arithmetic of calling an all-in, because you are being offered the pot plus an envelope. A call that is marginally wrong on chips alone can be clearly right once the bounty is added. The effect is strongest just after the bounty phase opens, when stacks are shortest relative to the envelope.
Two cautions. The bounty pool comes out of the prize pool, so the regular payouts of a mystery bounty event are smaller than those of a freezeout with the same buy-in; the flyer should say how the split works. And ICM still applies to the rest of the prize money, so the pull toward calling has to be weighed against the pay jumps you would be risking.
Where the numbers come from
Related terms in tournaments
- ICM, Independent Chip Model: the conversion from tournament chips into real money value.
- Guarantee, A minimum prize pool the organiser commits to regardless of entries.
- Satellite, A tournament whose prize is a seat in a larger one. Price the seat against the fee taken on the way in; it is where most players first meet ICM.
- Bubble, The point at which the next player eliminated finishes just outside the money.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.