There are two €1,100 Mystery Bounties at this year’s Irish Open and one of them kicks off today at 4pm. €500 of each buy-in goes into the bounty pool with a minimum prize of €500. There will be two equal top prizes with one of these reserved for the final table. Bounties kick in when we are in the money.
The Mystery Bounty Championship event made its Irish Open debut last year and was an instant hit with players, attracting more than 180 entries.
As ace reporter Dana Immanuel explained at last year’s Irish Open, a Mystery Bounty tournament is a poker-lottery hybrid of sorts. Half the buy-in goes into the regular tournament prize pool while the other half is assigned as bounties to each player that makes the money. Not all bounties are the same, and the players themselves are not told how much their own bounty is worth. Bounties range from fairly piddling to quite hefty indeed, but you won’t know what you’ve won until you bust and cash out any scalps you’ve collected. Bounties also mean that, in theory, you could earn more from these than from your prize money.
At last year’s debut event, Irish player Johnathen McCullagh seized top honours title-wise: a first prize of €23,950 and the first ever Irish Open Mystery Bounty trophy. The top bounty prize awarded was €25k. There were a total of 181 entries in the event, generating a €101,475 prize pool.