Quote:
Originally Posted by DogFace
Long-term, the people who play the best, consistently get the deepest, and eliminate the most players will collect the most envelopes and therefore the most big bounties. The payouts aren't going to be as flat though. Instead of being solely reliant on your final place as the determinant of your $$$ won, you have the "side quest" of knocking people out and collecting bounties to give you another cut of the prize pool. The big binks are going to be less impressive than a conventional MTT when you make the FT because so much of the prize pool will have been cannibalized by the bounties, but the medium binks can be a lot bigger.
I can see why it may not appeal to everyone, but I like the idea of flatter payouts in MTTs in general, and bounty events result in exactly that. Those runs where you go deep without touching the FT still have a chance to yield a nice payout vs. just winning a handful of buy-ins in a typical MTT setup.
Going deep in a tournament requires a lot more skill than knocking people out. That happens mostly through circumstance. The hands play themselves or your opponent makes a big mistake. You can go very deep in a tournament without knocking anybody out. There are certainly different strategies to employ when bounties are stake, but I don’t see this as somehow a fundamentally better form of poker. It’s just different.
Again, bounty tournaments are fine. So are mystery bounties. But if they, especially the latter, become the rule rather than the exception, it will be a sad day for poker. Anything which reduces the role of skill in the game diminishes it. There are always trade-offs, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we have to go too far towards the game being little more than a lottery. If people want to pony up a bunch of money for a small chance to win a big prize, there are plenty of opportunities within the casino for them to do so. But those aren’t poker.
If the main goal is flatter payout structures, that can be achieved pretty simply without fundamentally changing the way the game is played… by having flatter payout structures. They are certainly flatter today than they were, say 15 years ago. Maybe they can be even flatter. I don’t hear a ton of clamoring for that, but if people want it, it will happen.