When will Unibet poker add Mystery Bounty tournaments?
Almost every week, I’m asked the same question: ‘when will you be adding Mystery Bounty tournaments to your schedule?’. It’s a valid question, especially given how popular the format has become. In this blog post, I’ll break down how the Mystery Bounty format works, how our competitors have implemented it, and whether we’ll be seeing it on Unibet in the near future.
What is a Mystery Bounty tournament?
In a mystery bounty tournament you are rewarded a mystery prize (unknown amount) for knocking out another player. Unlike in regular bounty or progressive bounty tournaments, bounties typically aren’t available at the start of the tournament, so there’s no reward for knocking out players early on. Instead, mystery bounties will typically be added/become active when there’s between 15% and 25% of the players left.
The format was originally introduced in the WSOP back in 2020 and from there on it spread like wildfire. It gained traction in live poker, where you typically had to pick an envelope and open it to reveal your prize, and not long after it also saw the light of day online.
Today, there’re countless different variations of the format, with different bounty value distributions, the bounties kicking in at different stages of the tournament, different share of total prize pool going towards the bounties etc. At the time of writing, the most common format is:
- 50% of the total prizepool goes towards mystery bounties (the remaining 50% will be distributed according to a regular payout distribution based on finishing position)
- Mystery bounties become available when players are in the money (15%-20% of players left)
Why are there no Mystery Bounty tournaments on Unibet?
As with any product development, it’s ultimately a question of prioritization – if we had unlimited resources, we would introduce it today, as a niche format. Unfortunately, this is no fairyland: resources are limited and the question is whether Mystery Bounty tournaments really are such an amazing format and their popularity will continue to increase?
Personally, I’m not a huge fan. I love the envelope-picking excitement at live events, but beyond that gimmick, I don’t see much appeal. The format has several shortcomings:
- The target audience for this format is casual players, with the unique selling point being that a single knockout could yield a life-changing payout. You don’t have to win the tournament to secure the biggest return. Sounds great in theory, but the reality is that most players will never experience the thrill of a big mystery bounty, as they get knocked out long before it becomes relevant. The format currently implemented by other sites feels like an awkward hybrid that doesn’t fully know what it wants to be.
- If you aren’t the biggest poker network in the world, you’re stuck with a hard choice:
- Allocate a significant share (majority) of the mystery prizepool to a single bounty, for a great marketing message and attractive selling point.
- Make a much lower variance and reasonable distribution, with a relatively low top prize. It becomes so much of a gimmick, that it’s almost pointless.
- With 50% of the prizepool being bounties, there just isn’t enough money available to achieve what the format is ultimately about (excitement due to great variance in bounty value distribution) while also having a format that’s realistically profitable in the long run. What we’ve seen other smallish networks do is frankly absurd, with more than 25% of the total prizepool (not just bounty prizepool, but the total) going towards a single bounty, which can be triggered as soon as the field is down to ≈20% of the players – more commonly, the biggest bounty is around 10% of the total prizepool, which is bad enough.
There are solutions – compromises – for some of the above, like making the initial stage without bounties a pure flip, but despite all poker operators seemingly being keen to host these tournaments, I’m not convinced it’s the format of the future, in its current shape. As mentioned earlier, I would introduce it today, as a promotional format, if we had unlimited resources, but it’s not because I find the format overly exciting.
Other applications of Mystery Bounty?
The Mystery Bounty mechanic itself is fantastic. We’ve already seen how the mystery and prize distribution model can revitalize a game type like SNGs. What was once a declining format—traditional hyper SNGs—has, in some regions, become the most popular poker game, with Spins, Jackpot SNGs, and HexaPro taking the industry by storm.
The idea of receiving an unknown prize for knocking out a player is something I’d love to introduce on Unibet poker. The real question is whether it’s best suited to an MTT format. The mystery element is clearly designed to appeal to casual players, and it seems like a more natural fit for something like HexaPro.
I firmly believe that any new format we develop today—especially one requiring significant resources—should be designed primarily with mobile users in mind, and the game duration should be kept reasonably short. Examples that would fit the bill:
- 5 player SNG, 15BB starting stack, 100% of prizes being from mystery bounties. Bounty value decided according to a buy-in multiplier distribution, exactly like in HexaPro. One significant difference here would be that there’s a unique distribution according to the order of knockout. The first bounty has a much lower average value than the last: for every player knocked out, the theoretical bounty value increases.
- 10-20 player SNG with initial 3 seat flips and then a turbo final phase with bounties. Bounties also decided according to distribution but with same theoretical value for all KO’s.
It’s likely we’ll see some kind of Mystery Bounty format on Unibet in the future. The question is mostly whether we’ll copy the industry standard for promotional purposes or create something different and better. As for timeline, I can’t disclose anything here, but this year is out of the question.