Bounty tournaments: chase the short stacks, not the big ones.
Half your buy-in never reaches the prize pool — it sits on other players' heads. That means winning a pot can pay you twice, so you can call hands you would never call in a normal tournament. The catch is who you call against.
Three formats, one structural idea.
All of them take part of the prize pool off the payout ladder and put it on players instead. What differs is when you get paid, how much of it you keep, and — in one case — whether you know what you are playing for at all.
Classic knockout
A fixed prize on every player, paid in cash the moment you eliminate them. Simplest to price and increasingly rare: with a $50 head on a $109 entry, every knockout is money you keep whatever happens afterwards.
Progressive knockout (PKO)
The standard today, and the one this page prices. You bank half of every bounty you win and the other half is added to your own head — so knocking people out makes you richer and simultaneously makes you the most valuable target at the table.
Mystery bounty
Heads are worth nothing until you take one, at which point you draw from a pool where a handful of tickets hold most of the money. The advertised average is arithmetically true and practically misleading, for reasons the numbers below make plain.
Where the money actually is
In every one of these, roughly half the prize money never reaches the payout ladder. Finishing well still matters — it just matters less than it does in a freezeout, and the half sitting on heads is only available to players willing to go and take it.
The mystery-bounty average is not the mystery-bounty payout
A pool of 1,000 tickets worth $100,000 in total — the shape operators actually use, with a headline ticket at the top. Bars show how much of the money each tier holds.
The advertised average is $100 and it is arithmetically correct. The ticket you will actually draw is $50, because that is what 98% of the pool holds. Only 2% of tickets beat the average at all — one of them carries a quarter of the entire pool on its own.
The discount is biggest against the smallest stacks.
Winning an all-in in a knockout event pays the pot plus a head. The head is a fixed prize; their stack is what you must risk to collect it. Divide one by the other and you have the entire strategic content of the format.
You cover an opponent and they move all-in. The bounty you would bank by busting them is worth 5,000 chips — half of a $50 head, which is the part a progressive knockout pays you in cash. Big blinds are shown at the 1,000 level.
Every row started at 50%. In chips, calling an all-in for your tournament is break-even at a coinflip, always, at every stack depth — that is the baseline the ICM guide works from and the one push/fold assumes. A bounty is the only thing in a tournament that legitimately pulls that number down, and here it pulls it as far as 22%.
Now read the middle column, because it is the one people get backwards. Against 2,000 chips the head is worth 2.5 times what you are risking to take it. Against 25,000 it is worth 0.2 times, and the discount collapses to 4.5 points — near enough to nothing to ignore. The heads worth chasing are the cheap ones, and the players wearing them are the ones nobody is watching.
Blinds and antes are left out. Including them lowers every figure in the last column by roughly a point or two without changing the order, and they would obscure the one variable this table exists to isolate. The bounty is priced at the bankable half only — the half that lands on your own head is real value we have chosen not to count, so if anything these thresholds are a little too high.
Half of every head you take lands on your own.
This is the mechanism that makes a progressive knockout different from a plain one, and it cuts in both directions on the same hand. Here is exactly where a bounty goes.
Only the middle cell is money. The right-hand cell is a prize you have won for somebody else, redeemable by you only if you outlast the whole field. It is worth something — it is simply not worth its face value, and there is no honest way to say exactly what it is worth. Everything on this page prices the bankable half and ignores the rest, which is the conservative choice: the real correction is a little larger than the numbers here suggest, never smaller.
It also makes you the target. Your head starts at $50 and grows by $25 every time you knock somebody out:
- 1 knockout — $25 banked, and your own head is now $75
- 2 knockouts — $50 banked, and your own head is now $100
- 3 knockouts — $75 banked, and your own head is now $125
- 5 knockouts — $125 banked, and your own head is now $175
By the time you have run well for an hour you are worth more than double the field average, and every stack that covers you knows it. That is the cost of the run, and the adjustment is to tighten what you are willing to get all-in with — not to stop hunting, but to stop offering yourself at the same price you did when your head was worth $50.
And doing none of it is not free. Of the $109 you paid, $9 is the fee, $50 buys your place on the payout ladder, and $50 buys a price tag you wear for other people to collect. Play the event exactly as you would a freezeout and you never touch that second half — you have paid $109 to compete for $50 of prize money. The bounty pool is not a bonus attached to the tournament. It is half the tournament, and it has to be taken.
Whose head is actually worth taking.
The table above gives you a price. These four things decide whether you are being offered it at all — and every one of them is visible in the stack sizes before you look at a card.
If you do not cover them, the bounty does not exist
You collect a head by eliminating someone, and you cannot eliminate a player who has more chips than you. Against anyone who covers you, the price of a call is the plain 50% it would be in a freezeout — the entire discount on this page vanishes. Check the stacks before you check the odds.
The bounty is not on the table. It is on the players you can actually bust.
Short heads are cheap heads
The bounty is a fixed prize and their stack is the price of admission, so the discount scales with one against the other. Against a 2,000-chip stack the bounty is worth 2.5 times what you risk; against 25,000 chips it is worth 0.2. That is the difference between a call with any two cards and a call that barely moved.
Hunting the chip leader for their head is a story people tell. The money is in the small stacks.
Chips buy heads, which is why they compound
In a freezeout an extra chip is worth slightly less than the last one. In a bounty event every chip you gain can push you past another player's stack, and each time it does, one more head becomes collectable. The chip leader is not just ahead — they are the only player at the table eligible for every prize on it.
The big stack is the only one playing for all the money.
Do not pay for the same head twice
The discount applies to the chips you commit, and it does not renew. Calling a shove at the corrected price is right; calling, missing, and then paying again on a later street against the same short stack is how a bounty turns from a discount into a bill. Take the price once, and only when the maths hands it to you.
A bounty lowers the price of one confrontation, not of every hand you play against them.
Your stack decides how many heads you can reach.
This is the part of a knockout event with no freezeout equivalent. A chip lead is not just a cushion here — it is the only seat eligible for every prize on the table. Pick the one that describes you now.
Chip leader · Covers the table
Every head at the table is available to you, and to nobody else.
- Call short-stack shoves at the corrected price — you are the only one who can.
- Attack the stacks you cover by the widest margin, not the ones closest to you.
- Take flips against small stacks that you would decline in a freezeout.
- Stop looking for spots against the other big stack; there is no bounty in them.
Against a 2,000-chip stack your bar is 22% instead of 50%. That is the position everything else on this page is trying to reach.
Middle of the pack · Covers some
You have a shortlist rather than a table, and it changes every time chips move.
- Keep a live count of who you cover — it is the only thing that turns the discount on.
- Take the discounted spots against the shorts below you; pass the ones above.
- Prefer accumulating against players you already cover to gambling with those you do not.
- Do not spend your stack chasing a head that would leave you unable to collect the next one.
A discounted call against a short stack is the best price you will be offered all tournament. A coinflip against someone who covers you is the worst.
Short stack · Covers nobody
You are the prize, so use it: people will call you far too wide.
- Expect to be called light — your head is cheap and everyone at the table knows it.
- Shove your good hands rather than your speculative ones; fold equity is largely gone.
- Prefer shoving into the players who do not cover you, where the discount does not apply.
- Double once and the picture inverts — you become the one collecting heads.
Your shoves get called at prices no freezeout would justify. Adjust by tightening what you shove, not by shoving less often.
A bounty is ICM running backwards.
Near the money, ICM makes calling more expensive than a chip count says. A bounty makes it cheaper. On a knockout bubble both are true at once, for the same player, in the same hand — so here is what actually happens when they collide.
Four players left, three paid $500 / $300 / $200, and $25 bankable on your head. You are on 6,000 chips and you shove. The green bar is what each player needs in a freezeout bubble; the gold is what the bounty takes back off it.
The bounty does not just soften the bubble — it overturns it. On a freezeout bubble the chip leader would need 54.8% to call, comfortably above the 50% a chip count asks for. Put $25 on your head and the same call needs 46.5% — below the coinflip baseline. Every instinct that says people fold near the money is correct in a freezeout and wrong here.
And look at the bottom row. The other short stack is sitting at the same table, on the same bubble, facing the same shove — and needs 55.1%, exactly what they would need without any bounty in the building. They cannot cover you, so busting you is not something they can do, so there is nothing for them to collect. It is the cleanest illustration on the page of the rule from section four: the discount belongs to the players who can eliminate you, and to nobody else.
Which flips the usual bubble advice on its head. In a freezeout, a short stack near the money is holding the most powerful weapon in tournament poker — everyone else has too much to lose. In a knockout event that same short stack is a discounted lottery ticket, and the players who used to fold are now the ones getting the best price at the table. The bubble guide covers the freezeout version; this is what changes when half the pool is riding on heads.
Four ways bounty players give it back.
Three of these come from applying the discount where it does not exist. The fourth comes from forgetting that the maths works on you too, once your own head is worth something.
Hunting the biggest stack
The chip leader has the most money on their head and is the worst target on the table. You usually cannot bust them, and when you can, the price of admission is so large that the bounty barely moves the break-even. The heads worth chasing belong to the players nobody is looking at.
Forgetting who covers whom
The entire discount on this page is conditional on being able to eliminate the person you are calling. Apply a bounty-adjusted range against a player who has you covered and you are simply calling too wide, with no compensation of any kind.
Paying full price for a head
The maths lowers what a call needs; it does not make the call free. Chasing an elimination with hands that are behind even at the corrected price is the single most expensive habit in these events, and it is dressed up as aggression.
Ignoring the price on your own head
Every knockout you make raises what you are worth to everyone else. After a good run you will be called wider than anyone else at the table, and the hands you were happy to shove an hour ago are now shoved into a much stickier field.
The bounty cheat sheet.
Everything above, compressed to what to do and what to stop doing the next time half the prize pool is sitting on people rather than on the ladder.
- Check who you cover before you check your cards.
- Take the discounted price against the shortest stacks, where it is largest.
- Treat chip accumulation as buying eligibility, not just survival.
- Tighten your shoving range once your own head becomes valuable.
- Don't apply a bounty-adjusted range to a player who covers you.
- Don't hunt the chip leader — that head costs more than it pays.
- Don't keep paying after the one discounted decision has passed.
- Don't assume the advertised mystery average is what you will draw.
Half the money is on people, not places.
One number moves, and it moves down.
A freezeout all-in breaks even at 50%. Add a bounty and the same call breaks even at 22% against a short stack. Everything else in a bounty tournament follows from that single correction.
It only exists if you cover them.
On the bubble the chip leader sees their bar fall 8.3 points because they can bust you. The stack that cannot does not get the discount at all — same table, same hand, different price.
Half the prize pool has to be taken.
Nobody hands you the bounty half of your entry back for finishing well. Play a progressive knockout the way you would play a freezeout and you have paid full price for half a tournament — which is exactly what the format is designed to charge you.