Bounty tournaments have gained quite a bit of respect among the high stakes community, as evidenced by the big turnouts in the NAPT $5,000 Bounty Shootout events (you can follow NAPT news on a ton of sites, including www.pokersite.org). Many sights have begun to offer the bounty shootout or bounty multi table tournament to their schedules, including SCOOP, WCOOP, and FTOPS events and weekly majors, so learning how to play these tournaments and understanding how much that additional bounty is worth is key in developing a sound strategy for beating them.

One of the most important things I keep in mind when I load up a poker no download site and play a bounty tournament is the amount of the entry that goes into the bounty pool, or if there are any bonuses for collecting a large amount of bounties. If it’s a standard bounty tournament, every knockout is worth between 10-25% of your buy-in, on average, which makes knockouts somewhat valuable, but nothing you’ll be going out of your way to pick up. If there’s a bonus attached to a pro or for getting the most knockouts (Five Star Classic=$5,000 per pro bounty, NAPT Bounty Events= $1,000 per knockout with a bonus to the most knockouts) it makes going for the knockout much more lucrative, and it may shift your strategy a bit.

When the bounties have value, you need to be aware of the two way street that those bounties represent. If you have a bounty on your head as well, players will be gunning for that bounty, and you should be aware that players will be a bit more inclined to call you down loosely or risk a coin flip when they may normally just pass, because of the added money that the bounty represents. A player with 5 bounties in a 90 player bounty tournament may happilly risk 20% of his stack with just a naked flush draw if winning means getting a crucial 6th bounty and giving him better odds of being the player that collects the additional award for most bounties. That means that bluff all-ins have much less value than they normally would, as players that would be looking for an excuse to call you now have one; the bounty.

It also means that players moving all-in that are putting themselves at risk are more likely to have a real hand; they see the value of knocking them out hanging over their head and adjust appropriately, tightening up when they do make a critical move. You’ll see a bit less bluffing and a lot more monster hands when someone shoves in a bounty tournament. By keeping a good eye on the players that are aware of or are in contention for the bounty title in a tournament, you can more effectively overvalue hands that you may not normally push as hard in a regular tournament.

A final note is “special” bounties, like at Doyle’s Room (a site that does allow instant echeck poker deposits) or the Shooting Star tournaments that add a bonus bounty to players. It helps to calculate the amount that this additional bounty adds on to your profit before determining whether or not it is in your best interest to go out of your way to bust this player; look at how much the equity you get in busting the player adds to your overall equity before making the decision to call or fold.