"It feels heavy..."
Jorge Rios toyed with playing EPT Monte Carlo this year before deciding on the Irish Open instead. He’ll be glad he did; he just won the same prize for opening a Mystery Bounty envelope – €102,600 – that Tuesday’s winner will receive for outlasting 1,221 other players.
Day 2 of the €1,000,000 Guaranteed €1,150 Luxon Mystery Bounty brought back 385 players from four starting flights, with 184 places paid. Bounties came into effect once players made the money, and the first break thereafter was a lucky dip frenzy.
Cashing is only half the story in this Mystery Bounty that will pay out a total of €1,191,450: half of the prize pool is in bounties that mirror the regular payouts. So, for every €560 min-cash, there’s an envelope with a €560 bounty. For every final table payout, there’s a final-table-payout equivalent bounty – including first prize.
That prize was claimed early on when Rios approached the wooden bounty chest holding his token (for knocking out a competitor) as if it weighed more than the paper it was printed on.
“It feels heavy,” he said, hoping that this portended something good.
With cameras trained on him, he did the Slow Pull, seeing three…four…five…six figures! The crowd went wild (with a mixture of excitement and, if they were still in the Mystery Bounty themselves, a tinge of disappointment).
“I’m gonna play way better now, because I feel like I already won the tournament!” Rios told Phil ‘The Tower’ Heald. His friend, who has 5% of him, also presumably feels as if he’s already run deep.
Despite the fact that some have already gone during the course of Day 2, the top ten bounties (and prizes) are worth mentioning, because they’re pretty chunky – as you’d expect for the biggest Mystery Bounty event ever held in Ireland:
1 – €102,600 *won by Jorge Rios*
2 – €63,860
3 – €45,620
4 – €35,080
5 – €27,000
6 – €20,785
7 – €15,980
8 – €12,280
9 – €9,440
10 – €7,260
Full payout information (and live updates) can be found on PokerNews.
