Tourney Best way to run a PKO tourney at home? (1 Viewer)

[maloviz]

Hey PCF,

I've recently been thinking of ways to spice up my home tourney and thought a PKO (Progressive Knock-Out) tourney would be fun. I read some other threads on here (there aren't many) on PKOs and given it a little bit of thought and want to get opinions on what I've landed on so far. I'm still far from finalizing these plans so discussion and suggestions are very welcome.

It would essentially be a normal tournament, but no prize money outside of bounties. Here's the basic idea for the bounties:

• Each player buys in for $20 (This is normal for a tourney buy in for my group) and gets 4 NCV chips which represent $5 bounties each.
• When a players knocks out another player they add half (rounded up) of the opponents bounty chips to their own, the other half (rounded down) gets swapped out for $5 chips (the same $5 chips I use for cash). The reason I think $5 chips would be more fun than just giving them cash right away is to see more chips on the table. After they bust they could take these to a potential cash game running on the side, or just cash them.
• When it's down to 2 players (heads up) the tourney ends and those 2 players cash their own bounty chips. The reason for this is so that 1 person doesn't get a massive amount compared to everyone else. Running through a couple examples I noticed that without doing this the 1st place winner usually gets a insane amount compared to everyone else, mainly because they will likely have collected a lot of bounties on their own head, as will the 2nd place person, and 1st cashes all of those.
  Usually by the time it's heads up in my tourney, players are ready to just chop and play some cash or head home, so I have a feeling that most players wouldn't really want to play heads up anyways.

I can imagine the last point being controversial so I wanted to open up this thread to get input on what others think about this idea.

 

[XxKingPearxX]

Are you allowing rebuys? My only concern with a bounty-only tournament is that it might incentivize players to get it in immediately and you might not actually get to play any poker. Very tempting to flip on the first hand knowing you immediately get 50% of your buy-in back if you win. Everyone else at the table is kinda screwed because 1 player busts (so you can't get their bounty) and the 2nd player has 2x starting stack (so you can't get their bounty either). Maybe half the buy-in goes towards bounties and the other half towards a normal payout structure?

 

[maloviz]

Are you allowing rebuys? My only concern with a bounty-only tournament is that it might incentivize players to get it in immediately and you might not actually get to play any poker. Very tempting to flip on the first hand knowing you immediately get 50% of your buy-in back if you win. Everyone else at the table is kinda screwed because 1 player busts (so you can't get their bounty) and the 2nd player has 2x starting stack (so you can't get their bounty either). Maybe half the buy-in goes towards bounties and the other half towards a normal payout structure?

Hmm. I hadn't given too much thought to rebuys or how they could impact this event. I usually prefer to allow at least 1 rebuy at all my events so people don't drive out just to get unlucky and not get to play much poker.

I guess a compromise could be allowing rebuys under a certain condition, such as specifying what constitutes as a "bad beat" and only allowing rebuys after a bad beat.

Doing a % as main prize pool isn't a terrible idea either. I just thought 4x $5 tokens fit nicely into the $20 buy in I know most of my players are comfortable with.

 

[XxKingPearxX]

Depends on your group I guess, I know for my group if we did an only-bounty payout structure, the tournament would be over in like half an hour.

You could still use the tokens and the $20 buy-in, just give each player 2 and put 2 aside for prizing. At some point, someone will have an odd number of bounty tokens though. Also it doesn't have to be a 50-50 bounty/prize pool split, could be 3:1 etc, w/e works for your group.