Mystery Bounty MTTs are the best thing since sliced bread OR they're gimmick poker

I am not a fan. Generally, half the prize pool goes to the mystery bounty. And while there is still skill invoved in obtaining the bounties, there is far more of a luck factor vs. old fashioned freeze out tournaments. The one positive is that more fish play mystery bounty tournaments, but I still prefer the freezout even if the competition is slightly better.

Competition is lower in mystery bounties, but the sharks have a bigger advantage. The math is much more complex. I like them, because I don’t play a lot of tournaments and they are just more fun.

People suck at mystery bounties which is the positive thing about them. The bad thing is that the last thing tournament poker needed was more variance. I played a big one a few weeks ago. Got into the money. Some trash player won the big bounty after 10 minutes while I lost all flips and busted. You are forced mathematically to take flips and its all luck once the bounty phase starts and until the big bounties are gone. When the biggest bounties are gone it reverts to a fairly normal tournament where the bounties no longer outweigh the payjumps that much but at that point you are playing for a pathetic prize pool considering the buyin and number of runners.

So they create action and bring in rec players. I'm not a tournament guy but how is that a bad thing?
If it wasn't for variance poker and casinos wouldn't exist.
A trash player is great for that player pool. He'll donk the money back over time and bring in more trash players.

When the format makes it so that only a luckbox (be it a good or a bad player) will ever be in the green over time it hardly matters that more bad players play.

10% or so of the prize pool goes to 1 random bounty. That is how online is anyways where they are huge. Makes for some weird math as well if you go deep and the top prize is still there. The average bounty might end up 10-50+ buy ins.

I don't think people call anywhere near wide enough in most spots online.

I think your longtime ROI is going to be highest in a mystery bounty vs the traditional formats because of the quality of play. The problem is how large of a sample size you would need to realize your ROI edge because the variance in these tournaments far exceed the norm. As a result, I play a few here and there but I would never overdo it as it would be difficult to make a living off of them considering there may be long gaps of feast/famine.

Ok...

(I only know the format from the Irish Open highlights on YouTube last year.)

Why is the mystery bounty drawn (online) @ the time of the bust? Why can't it be @ a later point (like the Irish Open ie post the finish of the mtt)?

Because it's easy to have an online player draw immediately while playing whereas it's lot less practical to do that in a live tournament. Most importantly, the EV is the same either way, so there's no "advantage" to drawing now or later. The sooner the drawings are done, the better it is for the operator. Thus, online has you do it immediately.

The EV is higher for a good player if they're drawn as people are knocked out because they'll adjust better to the changing bounty values than a bad player.

To show how bad people are at understanding their value-

The first Series borgata had after covid had a mystery bounty 2200 dollars (might be off by some small amount)

The final 7 players did an ICM chop which didn't factor in the bounties. They then each drew one bounty.

Obviously this is an amazing deal for short stacks and beyond braindead for big stacks.

MB suck but if they bring the fish in then whatever

1) EV in the bounty draw is different than tournament EV.
2) IMO in general good players are going to be better at assessing the overall value of the remaining bounties regardless of the speed at which they are chosen. Maybe as you get down to just a handful, weaker players might be able to get a better idea. However that just brings us right back to the issue of it being impractical when you consider the size of some of these live MBs.

In some ways the size of the MBs live make the EV calculations easier. It allows you to just calculate how many of the biggest bounties are left and since they will comprise a such huge portion of the bounty pool, it’s easier to use an average bounty amount for the rest when you divide the number of players left.

I'm not a fan but PKO is pretty awesome. Just changes the way people play and gives it a nice added layer. Probably better for ROI as well but smarter people will chime in. I also hardly have time to play tournaments but have done really well in them so I guess I'm biased.

I'm a fan of mystery bounty tournaments, but I wouldn't want to play them all the time. They're a fun change of pace every once in a while.

What makes mystery bounty tournaments great is that they're the rare format that benefits both pros and recreational players. Pros are going to adjust better, so there is an additional edge to be had.

Recreational players have a more realistic chance of winning one of the top prizes compared to a regular tournament. In a regular tournament it's pretty unlikely they are going to play well enough against a bunch of pros late to win first place, but it's more feasible they could sneak into the money, win one bounty and draw a big one.

Has anyone actually looked at the real effects of mystery bounty tournamenta on variance? I wouldn't expect the variance to be greatly increased unless the bounties are concentrated to where most of the money goes to a small number of bounties (similar to how top heavy large field tournaments have the most variance). Whether you have to draw the right bounty to win or win 10 straight all in flips, it's still a lot of variance either way.

Of the 1, 045 total bounties in the $1k MM last year:

The top 2 combined amounted to 34% of the total bounty prize pool.

The top 4 combined amounted to 47% of the total bounty prize pool.

Yeah I know the mystery millions is very top heavy. I played it last year, made day 2 and got 1 bounty but missed out on the big ones. I must admit it was a lot of fun getting like a 1/500 chance to win a million. Still I'm probably going to skip it this year because it's a glorified lottery ticket. If I do play it will be like one bullet just for fun.

It's different though in some of the smaller mystery bounty tournaments where the spread of the bounties is more reasonable. If the spread is small it's more realistic to look at the bounty variance similar to the massive variance you face when you get it in as a flip on the final table.