PokerStars Joins Mystery Bounty Craze, Full Launch Expected Soon

Summary:

• PokerStars tested its first MB tournament on December 4 via its dot-com client
• The test tournament featured a buy-in of $1.10 and a guarantee of $100
• MB tournaments could be fully rolled out in the coming days

There’s good news for PokerStars players who love the popular Mystery Bounty format – the operator this week launched a public testing version of its first Mystery Bounty tournament which is expected to be followed by a full rollout.

Mystery Bounty Makes its Way to PokerStars

On December 4, PokerStars added a Mystery Bounty tournament to its MTT schedule for public testing. The tournament had a buy-in of $1.10 and a guarantee of $100, with the number of players capped at 200. Players were eager to participate, quickly filling the available slots.

Mystery Bounty tournaments have taken the poker world by storm in recent years because of their unique format which involves surprise bounties, the amounts of which remain unknown to players until they’re eliminated.

The format has swiftly made its way to both the live and online poker scenes. It is now part of the schedule of some of the world’s biggest live poker series, with the format also offered at several online poker rooms.

PokerStars has adopted the standard structure for MB tournaments, allocating half of the buy-in to the bounty pool, with the bounty element coming into play once everyone is in the money. As for the test tournament on December 4, 50 cents from each buy-in went to the bounty pool while 48 cents went to the regular pool. PokerStars took the remaining 12 cents as tournament fee.

Players began the action with a 10,000 starting stack played to four-minute levels. All in all, a total of 27 players reached the money and each of them received a share of the $100 bounty pool. The bounty amounts ranged from $1.04 to $28. The bounties were contained in a golden envelope given to players after they were eliminated.

Full Launch Soon

PokerStars has not added any more MB tournaments to the tournament schedule. The operator also has not announced further details as to when the public testing will conclude but a full launch is expected in the days ahead.

It also remains uncertain whether the tournaments will be made available in the US and Ontario. The test version only accepted players from the UK, Argentina, Canada, Finland, Poland, and Brazil.

Several online poker networks have already incorporated the MB format into their schedules, including GGPoker, 888poker, WPN, WSOP US, and iPoker.