If you’re looking for a way to add a little something extra to your tournaments, you may want to consider adding bonuses for knocking out players (aka, bounties). Many professional tournaments do variations of this, including the World Poker Tour’s Shooting Star tournaments (where player’s get an instant $5,000 for knocking out one of the pre-selected poker pros). Since your own games probably don’t have any big name pros or celebrities, the best bet is to probably just give a bonus for all players you knock out.
So how should the KO bonuses work? Well, the easiest way would be to just have everybody throw in an extra few bucks on top of the regular buy in so that the extra cash goes towards knockouts. In the league I’m in, we are probably going to make the knockout bonus 10% of the buy-in. So if your buy-in is $20, each player should throw in an extra $2. Each time a player is knocked out, the person who knocked them out will get $2. Obviously you can adjust the amount of the bonuses depending on what you think is best for your league.
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