The truth about bounties

Even though I've only played 47 KOs in my career so far, I'm catching on to the beauty of bounties :-) The true beauty of bounties is not actually in collecting them, though that's a nice side benefit; the true beauty is that they attract a lower caliber of player to the table. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the ugly truth of successful poker is that the profit derives from playing against players who aren't as good as you. The more poor players there are at a table, the better the odds for the players who are marginally better.

This is an excerpt from my October 11, 2016 post. I see now that I was horribly mistaken. That happens a lot in poker :-) In my current opinion, which has a high probability of not standing the test of time, I think bounties should be avoided like the plague. Why? Two reasons:

1. the prize pool is divided in half; half for your final position, and half for the bounties you've collected along the way; since there's little skill involved in collecting a bounty, bounty tournaments reward luck more richly; luck is not a reliable indicator for profit

2. bounties attract a lower caliber of player to the tournament

While reason one may may make some sense, reason two is the diametric opposite of what I claimed before. What gives? Simply this: not all lower caliber of players are alike! The really bad players will fail to fold where they should, and therefore some of them will be the beneficiaries of luck they didn't deserve. The opponents you really want to face are good players, just not quite as good as you :-) You want to avoid really bad players like the plague. Bounty tournaments attract all kinds of players, including the really bad ones. That's why I've decided to just say no to bounties.

style flavor  buy_in    entry players entries paid place  winnings

MTT   NLHE   4400000   600000       8     168   27    16  11090000
MTT-B NLHE   2200000   300000       8     291   41    32   3790000

delta: $-3,910,000
MTT NLHE balance: $398,461,468
2022 balance: $313,887,000
blue distance: $5,010,000
balance: $408,730,953