A Champion’s Guide to Knockout Poker Formats

If you’ve opened any online poker client recently you will have seen an explosion of Knockout (KO) games in the schedule. With the variety of options available online, it can be daunting to figure out what games offer the best value to you and how to adjust your approach to these games, given their unique payout structures. Today, we will explore the current landscape of KO formats in poker and provide some strategy tips for each of them.

Standard Knockouts (SKO)

The Format

This is the original KO game format and the simplest to calculate bounty values for. 50% of the overall prize pool is allocated to the bounty prize pool, with each knockout granting you a claim to a bounty that is worth a fixed amount, typically half of the tournament buy-in. Even though Standard Knockouts have become less popular online in favor of alternative KO formats, they are still seen quite often live.

The Strategy

The chip value of bounties in KO tournaments decreases over time as chip values increase due to ICM. This effect is greater in an SKO tournament than in PKOs because the average bounty value in a PKO increases over time, resulting in greater mitigation of ICM pressure.

In practice, you should bounty hunt more aggressively when early in this format as the starting bounties convert to a higher bounty powerBounty power
Bounty power is used to convert the dollar value of a bounty in a poker tournament to a chip value, or vice versa. The bounty power formula measures the power of chips you control relative to the remaining prize pool. than the ones in a PKO tournament. We can assign a chip value to bounties in SKOs using the same method used in PKOs as described in the Theory of Progressive Knockout Tournaments article.

The flip side of this is that as the tournament progresses and we get closer to the money, the chip values of these standard bounties decrease more rapidly than progressive bounties. Based on this trend, we can use the PKO solutions available in GTO Wizard as a starting point, expanding on the given ranges slightly in the early stages of the tournament but playing closer to ICM in the later tournament stages.

Progressive Knockouts (PKO)

It is important to note that the winner of a PKO MTT not only wins the second-place player’s bounty but their own as well. This is the only way to get access to all those other halves of the bounties you collected.

Interestingly, while this format is primarily played online, there are some live tournament series (e.g., the World Series of Poker Circuit series) that have begun adding these formats to their schedules.

The Strategy

As there are several articles available on our blog that cover various aspects of PKO strategy, this article is intended to function more as a travel guide to the world of knockout poker; we will not go into strategic detail here. But we can summarize a couple of key considerations to keep in mind when playing a PKO tournament:

Tournaments with this type of bounty have the highest variance in win rate since so much of the prize pool is assigned to only a couple of lucky knockouts in the money. It’s quite common for a single player to win more with a single knockout than the eventual winner of the tournament. This makes the Mystery Bounty format especially appealing to more recreational players who want to ‘gamble’ for a big win rather than trying to exert a skill edge to generate a consistent ROI.

The Strategy

In the Mystery Bounty format, players are incentivized to collect chips prior to the bounty phase to ensure they have the means to unlock as many bounties as possible. Once in the money, you can calculate the value of each player’s bounty in big blinds by using the following bounty power calculation:

This might intuitively feel incorrect if you’re just being introduced to Mystery Bounties, but this is the impact of potentially winning an average of 2 buy-ins in a single hand. In practice, this means to call a UTG 5bb shove from the BTN when covering; you would be risking 5 big blinds to win effectively ~26bb with blinds and antes.

The practical implication on your strategy is that quite often when the largest bounties in a Mystery Bounty tournament are still up for grabs, your calling/shoving range when covering should be incredibly wide, significantly more than in any other KO format. Of course, if the largest bounties are taken out of the bounty prize pool, the bounty power will decrease significantly.

One consideration is that while the bounty value has a huge impact on our ranges, a large part of the bounty prize pool is locked up in two or three outliers, while the remainder follows a more even distribution. To have a more realistic representation of a mystery bounty’s value, let’s remove these outliers from our example and see how they impact the bounty power per player.

Now we have a much more reasonable outcome, with mystery bounties having far less of an impact on our overall strategy. While this approach doesn’t give you as many opportunities to hit that big jackpot win it will make sure you are making more realistic decisions when deciding what hands to call a covered player with.

Summary

KO format games offer a tremendous opportunity to find value outside of Classic format games, as many players are less familiar with their unique strategies. In this article, we outlined three distinct KO game formats and provided jump-off points into their associated strategies:

SKO (Standard Knockout)

In this format, we hunt bounties wider than in a PKO in the early stages of a tournament, as a bounty represents ½ of a buy-in rather than a ¼ of one. As the tournament progresses, we begin seeking out bounties less on average than we would in a PKO as chips increase in value, but the SKO bounties’ initial value remains unchanged.

PKO (Progressive Knockout)

With the ever-increasing dollar value of PKO bounties, it is important to understand when and how we hunt bounties. This bounty-seeking behavior needs to be balanced with standard tournament ICM as we reach the later stages of the tournament.

Mystery Bounty

This is the latest flavor of knockout tournaments. In Mystery Bounties, it becomes important to build a chip lead before making the money to ensure we are in a position to unlock as many bounties as possible. Once the money is reached, we can use the average of remaining Mystery bounties to determine the bounty power assigned to each player when covering them.