Dara O'Kearney is a professional player, coach and author - as well as commentator, podcast host and more - with a sharp eye for analyzing tournament structures and devising effective strategies. Together with Barry Carter he has written the successful 'Poker Solved' series of books on poker strategy.
Coaching and study materials are available at Simplify Poker, including a free masterclass dedicated to the upcoming WPT $5M Freeroll. Details of how to access this free course can be found below.
The $5 Million WPT Freeroll is getting a lot of attention because, well, it’s a $5 million freeroll.
However, if you are a poker nerd like me, it also has one of the most interesting payout structures ever seen in poker. I guarantee that 99% of the players in this tournament will not understand how to play in this unique event.
Take a quick look at the payout structure before I go into more detail:
So here are some interesting nuances:
- It’s a mystery bounty
- 25% of the field get paid
- Big bounties are held back for the final table
- The first prize is very top heavy
- 100 x $10,300 tickets randomly awarded to players who bust in the money, before the final table
Here are some nuances you may not have noticed:
- The bounty prize pool is low compared to regular Mystery Bounties
- The final table bubble bounty will be known
How does this impact strategy?
I have a concept I call the ‘ICM Dial’ which refers to the ways in which payout structure pulls us and pushes us in different directions.
Flat payouts pull us in one direction, they make play tighter. Top heavy payouts do the opposite, they incentivise us to play for the win more.
In the $5 Million Freeroll the fact that a quarter of the field gets paid should tighten strategy. It’s really important to get that min-cash at least. The fact that some big bounties are held back for the final table also means that the final table bubble should be a cagey affair.
The first prize is 20% of the prize pool and four times that of the 2nd place prize, which pulls us in the other direction. Plus bounties in general reward looser players, again we should play more aggressively because of this.
So at different stages of the tournament, we will have competing incentives of playing for the win, and laddering, in a much more extreme manner than any other tournament.
Strange nuances
There are lots of other considerations, for example, the 100x $10,300 tickets awarded at random to players who make the money, but not the final table.
We can’t plan for those, because they are random, the only thing we can do is reassess what making the money is worth. It means that our $1,000 mincash is worth $3,105.27. That is on average, of course, some players won’t win the seats, but broadly speaking the mincash is worth three times more than usual.
Most Mystery Bounty events have half the prize pool in the bounty portion of the prize pool. In this event it is less than 1/5th of the prize pool. That means generally that the bounties are worth less than they are in a regular Mystery Bounty, so we should not go crazy for them.
The most interesting thing of all is that by holding back those final table bounties, it means that on the final table bubble, everyone will know what the penultimate bounty is worth before the finale.
If it’s one of the $500 bounties then, who cares? It will just play like a regular MTT final table bubble. But what if it was the $100,000 bounty? Then our players have a dicey decision of whether to go for it to win a six-figure bounty or to play tight to make that high equity final table.
It will also be interesting if the final $10,300 ticket has not been claimed, because that will become a consolation prize for the player who bubbles the final table. It actually means the 10th place finisher would win the same amount as first player out on the final table in equity ($25,000).
Learn how to play in this event for free
Kudos to the World Poker Tour, I think the poker community will not realise the genius of this payout structure until the event is over.
If you want to prepare for this event, whether you are trying to win a ticket or you already have, Barry Carter and I went into the lab to discover the optimal strategy for this event. We have prepared a 90-minute masterclass on how to navigate this unique payout structure.
You can get the masterclass for free, as well as a free ebook on poker study techniques and another masterclass video on GTO strategy, just by signing up to our email newsletter at Simplify Poker.
Dara O’Kearney is sponsored by Unibet Poker, the co-host of the award-winning Chip Race Podcast and creates books and courses over at Simplify Poker.
Additional image courtesy of Miguel Cortes
