Super KO and Progressive Super KO Tournament Strategy

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Super Knockout and Progressive Super Knockout tournaments on PokerStars have been one of the biggest innovations in online MTTs over the past year or two. They’re becoming increasingly popular because of their ability to draw in big crowds of recreational players who are attracted to the possibility of making money without necessarily winning the tournament, and to the competitiveness that comes with being rewarded for targeting other players’ stacks.

Many people diving into these tournaments for the first time are unaware of what adaptations are required in order to remain profitable – I see many recreational players and also some regulars making big mistakes by playing these tournaments the same way they would any other. It’s one thing to play a $27 KO tournament where the buyin is $20 and the KO is $5, but it’s another to play one where the buyin and the KO are equal. Let me explain.

Adding the value of KOs to the pot

In order to calculate the value of a decision in a Super KO tournament, what we first have to do is use ‘reverse ICM’ – converting from $ numbers to chip values – to establish how much each bounty is worth. If we’re playing a $27 Super KO tournament, we buy in for $27, with $2.50 going to the rake, $12.25 going into the prizepool, and $12.25 going into our bounty. For the $12.25 we invested into the prizepool, we were given 3,000 in chips (usually – some are deeper stacked and this changes the math somewhat, but the equation is the same). This means that every $12.25 in the prizepool equates to 3,000 chips.

Similarly, every $12.25 bounty on a player’s head also equates to 3,000 chips. Thus, if a player shoves all-in preflop and their $12.25 bounty is at stake, all we do is calculate our equity the same way we usually would, except with an extra 3,000 chips in dead money added to the pot. Crucially, the amount needed for us to call does not change. This is what allows us to call with a wider range. If it were simply equivalent to a bigger all-in shove, our calling range would get tighter, not looser.

In a Progressive Super KO, where players’ bounties increase as they knock out other players, most situations will involve a bounty bigger than just one buyin. Indeed, the numbers can vary greatly, since each player gets half the bounty of the player they eliminate added to their own bounty. All this means is that we add 3,000 chips (or one starting stack) to the pot for every $12.25 in their bounty. So if their bounty was $78.50, this would be roughly 6.5 starting stacks, so we would add roughly 19,500 chips to the pot in the event that this player shoved all-in and we had the chance to call.

Getting it in early in SKOs

These calculations that lead us to add 3,000 to the pot for every KO have a significant impact on the early stages of the tournament. It becomes a lot more profitable to get it all-in for a large number of big blinds, since 3,000 chips worth of bounty equates to a 150bb overlay if the tournament starts at the 10/20 level. If we find ourselves with Ace-King in a spot where we would not normally want to get it in preflop, the spot suddenly changes, and getting it in as a flip for our whole stack is a great spot when there’s a bounty on the line. Even just one bounty covers our whole buyin, so the value of playing aggressively early in tournaments goes way, way up.

This phenomenon is of course multiplied in Progressive SKOs. We should be playing very aggressively early on, in an effort to generate spots where we can put players all-in for their tournament life. This aggressive style of play is what makes SKOs and PSKOs so popular, and so much fun – interestingly, it’s also the one area where most regulars fail to adapt sufficiently. The earlier it is in the tournament, the greater the value of KOs. Bear in mind, though, that it’s not a reason to go bluffing off your stack – indeed, your bluffs will get through a lot less often. But going hard with your draws and big hands is never a bad idea with KOs in play.

Adjusting in the mid game

This is where it starts to get a little tricky. In an SKO, the value of bounties goes down as the tournament progresses, because 3,000 chips becomes continually less significant while the bounties don’t increase. In a PSKO, however, the bounties increase as the tournament goes on, so we often find ourselves in spots where getting it in very light can be a good play if there’s a big bounty at stake, even if it jeopardises most of our equity in the tournament.

It’s entirely plausible that you might find yourself with 50 players left in a tournament and the player to your right having a bounty that equates to say, 7th-place money – if so, you should be going hell-for-leather to bust that player, since the value of winning his bounty is so great, and the value of winning his chips will give you a great shot at final tabling the tournament anyway. If that player is a short stack, be prepared to go to war with other players for a shot at getting all-in for the bounty.

Conversely, you should also expect dynamics to change significantly if you yourself have accumulated a huge bounty. When you’re a big stack, people will be even more cautious around you since they know you’re more likely to call their bluffs and take risks to try to bust them, and when you’re a short or middle stack you should prepare for your all-in shoves to get called a lot lighter, and consider making big over-shoves with strong hands to tempt people into calling you off with weaker ranges.

Difficult final table spots

The value of KOs goes way down in the late game. In Super KOs, winning one bounty for say, $12.25 is pretty insignificant when you’re at a final table that might have $3,000 for the winner. In a PSKO, however, that changes quite a bit. PSKOs are extremely top-heavy, and the nature of the bounty structure at the final table can completely change the dynamics at play. There’s no way to do the math in an exact fashion that I know of (at least not yet), but there are occasions where short-handed play is extremely lop-sided, with one or two players having very large bounties and others having much smaller ones.

In this case, traditional ICM is complicated even further by the fact that sometimes the bounty you win by busting someone might not be much less than what you gain by getting a payjump – this effectively doubles the payjump, since busting them gives you the payjump anyway. Of course, sometimes it’s the other way around, and getting the payjump is much more significant than the bounty, which brings it closer (although not equivalent) to traditional ICM.

In general your approach to final tables should be an exaggerated version of what it usually is. As a short stack, be aware that any player with a large bounty on his head is likely to be targeted by the big stacks, and may be at risk of busting sooner than you. As a big stack, go hell-for-leather at any big bounties you see, but stay cautious if the stack size of the player in question represents a big portion of your own stack. Punting away your chances to win the tournament for one bounty isn’t worth it in most cases.

The final word

The general idea is that Super KOs are more aggressive than usual tournaments, and Progressive KOs are wildly aggressive and incredibly top-heavy. There’s a huge amount of importance attached to winning a PSKO, because you get your own bounty back too. I recently had a student win a PSKO tournament for $3.7k plus $1.7k in bounties – if he had finished second, he would have received about $2.4k in prize money, but only around $700 in bounties, since he would not have gotten to keep his own $1k bounty.

There are no hard and fast rules to these tournaments, beyond the logic of adding chips to the pot when a player is at risk – they’re still very new and people haven’t quite worked them out yet. But in general, aggression is the way to go when there are big bounties at risk, and sometimes the bounties can become more important than anything else. If you bust a tournament in 25th place because you lost most of your chips going for a bounty that equates to final table money, don’t sweat it too hard.