Strategy For Playing In A Mystery Bounty With A Day 2 Chip Reset to ?

Strategy For Playing In A Mystery Bounty With A Day 2 Chip Reset to ?

Playing in an incredibly strange mystery bounty tournament structure this weekend on Global Poker. Basically, there are a whole bunch of Day 1 flights into Day 2, but then on Day 2 everybody starts with 62.5 big blinds with pretty solid levels structure (10 minute levels, will take about an hour and a half to get down to the point where a starting start would be ~15 blinds). We are already into the mystery bounty portion of the tournament once play starts.

I'm already into Day 2, so I'll be starting with the 62.5 bigs on a table with 8 other players with the same stack.

I suspect there will be ~250 players on Day 2, and the payout/mystery bounty structure is pretty standard (bounties mirror finishing positions, so first gets ~8% of the prize pool and the top bounty is also ~8% of the prize pool. Min cashes/bounties are the bottom 15% of finishes/bounties pulled, and they are equal to 0.15% of the prize pool (roughly a 60th of the amount of the first place/highest bounty position).

When Day 2 starts, the average mystery bounty ($110.60) will be about equal to finishing to in 15th ($111.25)place. The monetary distance between a min cash ($36.25) and the average bounty is about the distance between finishing 113th and 31-24th ($74.35) place.

The way that I have approached mystery bounties is about what I often see others doing: Once I'm in the money, the average mystery bounty is worth far, far, far more than the payjumps, and while my stack is worth quite a bit in ICM, half of the prize pool is locked up in bounties and the final table is unlikily to have any mystery bounty considerations (on Global, the moment a player is eliminated the bounty is pulled and removed from the prizepool, and the bounty table updates in real time). So, while my stack is worthwhile to maintain, when players I cover are all-in, I am very aggressive in rejamming to isolate with ragged hands, I try to mix trapping my super premiums with hands like unsuited connectors and total rags, and I rarely fold. When I am covering the entire table, I try to grab nearly every mystery bounty. This is all well and good and I'm comfortable trying to make judgment calls in these spots and living with the outcomes, but I have never played in a tournament where everybody's chip stack will be the same from the jump.

How should I approach the first few levels of this tournament? It's much easier for me to justify firing in 9 bids with T7o in the cutoff when a player with 4 blinds in the hijack goes all in the moment bounties become live, but I'm lost with being this deep when everybody else is equally deep. I know the answer isn't to treat this tournament like a non-bounty tournament, I also know the solution isn't to go absolutely nuts if somebody open rips it for 62.5 bigs or cold-4 bets all in with me yet to act. Is there any place that could have information that would be useful for this situation?

Thanks in advance. Sorry if my explanations weren't great, I've been grinding for the last 12 hours and I've never tried to discuss a situation like this before.

29 May 2025 at 07:45 AM
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