POTD #14 My First Bounty Hand

That's a Mounds bar to American readers

Whether they’re mystery, progressive, vanilla, or Luca Vivaldi’s new creation “quattro,” bounty tournaments are running all the time. There are multiple reasons for this: Mystery bounties are a very enticing lottery; you could bust someone in level 12 of a 2k tourney and win a million dollars. They also are a return to a pre-solver era of poker where intuitive problem-solving skills are more valuable than being well-studied and executing well. It’s 2025, so of course there are solvers that try to solve bounties, but I have found their outputs lacking for a variety of reasons I’ll get into in a future newsletter. For now, I’ll note that every bounty tournament is a little different. PKOs and Mystery Bounties feature bounties whose dollar value changes throughout the tournament. Even in a world where there was only one bounty format, the proportion of what money goes to the prize pool and what goes to the bounty pool varies. There’s no “one size fits all” solution, which is why the best bounty players are ones who are able to make the correct adjustments to every different situation. Today, I review a hand from the early stages of a progressive bounty where there was not that much bounty pressure and I got in too much money with a mediocre hand.

Hand History: GG Hand History

GG Blade Bounty King Sunday March 14th 2021 1500+1500 PKO

125/250/35 (SB/BB/A) I have 10.4k and Darren Covers

The Hand:
It folds to me in the CO and I raise A♦️5♦️ to 600, Darren Elias defends the BB.

Flop (1605) 8♠️5♠️3♥️: Darren checks, I bet 1185, Darren raises to 3250, I shove 9813, Darren calls 8♥️7♦️, wins and collects $750.