Online poker players love a good bounty tournament, so PokerStars on FanDuel is giving the people what they want with both Progressive Knockout and Mystery Bounty offerings filling their tournament lobby all week long.
At almost any time of the day, players can find a tournament with the added thrill of scoring some bonus bucks for eliminating a player on their way to a deep run.
Along the way, though, those bounties can become pretty valuable, sometimes even more so than a trip to the final table or even the winners’ circle.
Here’s a quick guide to PokerStars on FanDuel’s selection of bounty tournaments, along with a few tips on how to make the most of them.
Progressive Knockout (PKO)
PokerStars on FanDuel offers a wide variety of daily PKO tourneys with buy-ins starting as low as $5. There’s also a selection of weekly ‘featured’ PKO tournaments headlined by the marquee bounty tournament every Monday, the $200 Battle Royale, along with its smaller version, the $30 Mini Battle Royale.
PKO tournaments usually split players’ buy-ins evenly between the tournament prizepool and each player’s progressive bounty, some of which is claimed when scoring an elimination, with the other part adding to their own bounty.
It can lead to some very juicy bounties in the later stages of the tournament, which are worth claiming as much as, if not more than, the final payouts in the tournament.
Here are a couple of nuggets of wisdom to help you claim those bounties and make the most of a PKO tournament.
- With a covering stack, widen your ranges to win bounties – attack the short stacks and be ready to call off lighter than normal because those bounties can be worth far more than tournament ICM.
- Play somewhat tighter when short-stacked and covered since you’ll be called lighter.
- When short and moving all-in, high cards perform better than in a normal tournament because they’ll get it in dominant more than usual because of those wider calling ranges.
There is plenty of more in-depth PKO strategy available through many training sites like GTO Wizard, Octopi Poker, and PokerCoaching.com, as well as the very good book PKO Poker Strategy written by Dara O’Kearney and Barry Carter.
Mystery Bounty
The next evolution in bounty tournaments over the past few years has been the Mystery Bounty tournament, where players can win prizes bigger than even the 1st place share of the tournament prize pool, all with just one simple elimination and a lucky envelope pull.
PokerStars on FanDuel offers at least three Mystery Bounty tournaments daily, starting at just $10, with the $50 Sunday Mystery headlining the week’s Mystery Bounty offerings.
How to set yourself up to pull those big bounties? Here are a few more tips:
- Keep the short stacks alive when close to the Mystery Bounties kicking in. You don’t get anything for busting them before that, and they could be worth a lot for eliminating them once bounties are in play.
- In the levels leading to the bounties, play to build a stack so you’re able to hold a covering stack for them, but you don’t need to do anything extreme or out of the ordinary to get to that point.
- Once the biggest bounties are gone, top tournament payouts become priority again, and as such, ICM and endgame strategy revert to near normal.
Again, there’s more in-depth knowledge to be found on the training sites, but O’Kearney also provided a few tips exclusively to PokerOrg from his book, Mystery Bounty Poker Strategy.
All the details of each of these tournaments are available on the PokerStars on FanDuel client.
New players can claim a 100% deposit match bonus up to $1,000, along with $30 in Spin & Goal tickets.
Visit PokerStars on FanDuel now to get started - head here if you're in Ontario, or here in the US.
