Honeypotting in bounty-style poker tournaments

Bounty-style poker is a lot of fun.

Imagine you’re playing a live No Limit Hold’Em tournament at your local casino. Three tables, ten players per table, early stage. It’s a bounty-style, which means you get paid 1/4 buy-in every time you eject someone.

You isolated a weak player and dragged most of his chips in the pot; he checks on the river and you have the nuts. What do you do?

Anyone will tell you: duh, bet 13 (or shove, which is the same thing here). That’s probably what I would do in a normal tournament, but since there’s a bounty, what I do here is bet 10 big blinds, which tends to baffle people. Why do I do that? Let’s think of the possible outcomes.

Outcome 1: the weak player folds

It’s unlikely to happen, but if the weak player folds, I still get a nice pot, and the player doesn’t know if he was being bluffed or not, so he’s significantly weakened either way.

Outcome 2: the weak player goes all-in

In that scenario, I get a nice pot plus a bounty and there’s one less player in the tournament. Not bad.

Outcome 3: the weak player calls

The weak player has called the flop and the turn. He’s unlikely to fold all of a sudden, especially since he won’t be out of the tournament if he loses. He’ll still have some chips left to try and rebuild his stack.

So he calls. I win a nice pot. More importantly, there’s now blood in the water; the entire table will start chasing the bounty on that weak player. What’s likely to happen in the next round, the weak player will go all in out of position because he’s tilted and he will get called by three or four players, and some of those will go all-in too. And at the end of that next round, there’s going to be two or three less players in the tournament, and someone will have a bigger stack, which is fine by me because it’s a lot easier to beat a single big stack than beat four smaller ones.

Final thoughts

I call this strategy honey-potting and it works really well for me. It’s not what a GTO solver would advise, but I like to think about the bigger picture rather than just one hand at a time. Playing the players rather than playing the cards is my edge in live tournaments. If I just sit there and wait for queens I’m just gambling, I find it more satisfying to try and slowly re-shape the table to my advantage.