Progressive knockout bounty accounting

Keep an immediate bounty award separate from the bounty carried on your seat. They describe different destinations for the eliminated player’s bounty. A larger carried amount is not another immediate payment. Then keep both columns separate from tournament chips, entry costs and ordinary finishing prizes. A receipt becomes useful when every amount has a clear label.

This lesson uses a fictional profile called Half-and-Half. After a confirmed sole-winner bounty award, 50% is awarded immediately and 50% increases your carried bounty. All examples use fictional money units with 100 cents per unit. The worksheet reconstructs that split; it does not decide who earned the bounty, connect to an account or estimate the value of a poker decision.

Indira: “Which column records an award you received now?” Ace: “The immediate-award column.” Indira: “Good. Keep the carried bounty beside it, with its own label. Adding those columns would tell the wrong story.”

Choose the profile · Read one receipt · Follow the sequence · Confirm eligibility first · Build a receipt

Choose an award profile before calculating

A PKO name alone does not specify every allocation and settlement rule. Find the event’s entry breakdown, the immediate-versus-progressive award split, its bounty eligibility rules and its rounding procedure. Read them as separate pieces of information. A percentage used to fund the bounty pool need not answer how a later opponent bounty is divided.

PokerStars’ tournament-types page describes a common half-immediate, half-progressive award split and notes exceptions to the allocation of entries between prize and bounty pools. Its knockout help page also distinguishes PKO from Total KO. That documentation is useful context for checking a named event, not permission to apply one profile to every operator or format.

Our Half-and-Half profile specifies only the award split used in this exercise. It does not specify the fraction of an entry assigned to the prize pool, the initial bounty, fees or treatment of the eventual winner’s own bounty. None of those amounts can be recovered from the two input fields. Supply them separately when reviewing an actual event record.

The worksheet begins after eligibility is settled. Each input opponent bounty represents a confirmed sole-winner award under the fictional profile. Coverage, elimination, relevant-pot ownership and any operator ruling are assumed known outside the tool. A well-balanced receipt cannot turn an unconfirmed elimination into an authorized award.

Read the first receipt in two columns

Start with your carried bounty at 40.00. A confirmed opponent bounty has a current value of 60.00. Under Half-and-Half, 30.00 is the immediate award and 30.00 is added to your carried bounty. Your new carried amount is 40.00 + 30.00 = 70.00. These are fictional accounting amounts, not a record of a real payment.

The opponent’s 60.00 has two destinations: 30.00 awarded now and 30.00 carried forward. Your original 40.00 remains in the carried column. If you add the immediate 30.00 to the final carried 70.00 and call 100.00 your new cash winnings, you have included the original carried amount and a progressive increase as though both were new cash.

The word current matters. An opponent may have started with a different bounty before earlier confirmed awards increased it. This receipt uses the confirmed bounty being divided now. Substituting an opening amount of 20.00 for a current 60.00 would produce a different receipt. The calculator cannot identify that substitution from a number alone.

Follow three confirmed awards without counting any twice

Keep the starting carried bounty at 40.00 and enter opponent bounties of 60.00, 100.00 and 20.00 in that order. The immediate awards are 30.00, 50.00 and 10.00. The same amounts are added to your carried bounty, taking it to 70.00 after the first event, 120.00 after the second and 130.00 after the third.

Cumulative immediate awards are 30.00 + 50.00 + 10.00 = 90.00. Carried growth is also 90.00. The final carried amount is 130.00 because it includes the opening 40.00. “Final carried” and “carried growth” answer different questions even when both appear in the same receipt.

The confirmed opponent bounties total 60.00 + 100.00 + 20.00 = 180.00. Reconcile them with immediate awards + final carried − starting carried. Here, 90.00 + 130.00 − 40.00 = 180.00. Subtracting the opening carried amount prevents it from being counted as new value created by these events.

Ace: “Why subtract the opening 40.00?” Indira: “Because it was already carried before these awards. We are checking where the new 180.00 went, not awarding the opening amount again.”

Changing the order changes the intermediate receipt

Reverse the opponent sequence to 20.00, 100.00, 60.00. The first immediate award is now 10.00 and your carried bounty becomes 50.00. The second adds 50.00, taking it to 100.00. The third adds 30.00, taking it to 130.00. Final immediate awards remain 90.00 under this fixed split.

That order independence belongs to the supplied accounting rule. It does not say that the same future hands or opponents would be available after a different elimination sequence. We are reordering already supplied awards on a worksheet. No probabilities, future bounty opportunities or tournament outcomes are modeled.

Repeated values are allowed. Two confirmed opponent bounties of 60.00 could be two different events, so the worksheet does not delete a repeated number. Check the underlying event records to detect a duplicate entry. A list of amounts alone cannot distinguish two legitimate equal awards from the same award pasted twice.

Use whole cents and reject an unsupported rounding decision

The engine stores amounts as integer cents. For example, 10.02 becomes 1,002 cents. Half is exactly 501 cents, so the immediate and carried parts are each 5.01. The displayed two-decimal format is a way to read those exact integers, not a rounding rule applied to an approximate floating-point split.

An opponent bounty of 10.01 is different. Its 1,001 cents cannot be divided equally into two whole-cent amounts. The worksheet rejects it rather than assigning the extra cent to either side. A real event might use a stated rounding convention or another accounting unit. Read that rule; rejection here does not establish what an operator must do.

Your starting carried bounty need not be even in cents because the exercise carries it forward without splitting it. With starting carried 40.01 and an opponent bounty of 10.02, the immediate award is 5.01 and your new carried amount is 40.01 + 5.01 = 45.02. The odd opening cent stays exactly where it was.

A starting zero is accepted as a mathematical boundary check. Starting at 0.01 with a confirmed opponent bounty of 0.02 produces an immediate award of 0.01 and final carried bounty of 0.02. Those tiny amounts test the cent arithmetic; they are not a claim that any particular tournament permits those bounty values.

Settle coverage, side pots and elimination rights first

Winning chips and receiving a bounty require different records. A side-pot winner has not necessarily eliminated every opponent in the hand. Who contested the relevant pot, whose last chips were lost and which player the event recognizes as the eliminator matter. Do not infer all of those facts from the size of one stack or the fact that someone won a pot.

PokerStars’ published bounty rules identify the relevant pot as the pot containing the eliminated player’s final chips and provide separate treatment for tied awards and split-pot formats. This worksheet does not implement those rulings. Use the applicable event procedure to establish the confirmed award before entering its amount.

A tied elimination, multiple winners or an unusual simultaneous elimination is outside our sole-winner input assumption. Do not enter a full displayed bounty for each winner and expect the receipt to resolve the dispute. That could allocate the same bounty more than once. Obtain the confirmed breakdown, including how any progressive share is treated.

For a disputed live hand, retain the action, chip contributions and card information and ask tournament staff for the applicable ruling. For an online record, compare the actual award entry with the event rules and hand history. The worksheet has no authority over either record. Its conservation test checks the amounts you supplied after the ruling, not the ruling itself.

Keep chips, bounty awards and ordinary prizes in separate ledgers

Tournament chips describe what can be wagered and contested in a hand. Immediate bounty awards are recorded in the event’s money units. Carried bounty is a separate amount attached to the player. An ordinary finishing prize belongs to another line. Equal-looking numbers in these columns do not make their units or meanings interchangeable.

A stack of 30,000 chips and a carried bounty of 30.00 cannot be added into a meaningful cash total. Dividing one by the other does not automatically create a strategic exchange rate either. A decision model would need eligibility, outcome probabilities, regular prizes and future opportunities. The receipt supplies none of that information.

The immediate 30.00 in the first example describes the allocation under the chosen profile. It does not show that the earlier call, raise or shove was profitable. Correct arithmetic can describe the award following a poor decision, while a supported decision can fail to win the hand. To study the choice, reconstruct its own information and alternatives.

Entry costs and received prizes need their own reconciliation

Suppose a separate fictional record shows total entry costs of 55.00, an immediate bounty award of 30.00 and no ordinary prize received yet. Received cash minus recorded entry costs so far is 30.00 − 55.00 = −25.00. A carried bounty of 70.00 does not change that received-cash comparison.

That comparison is not a complete valuation of the remaining tournament position. It records paid costs and received amounts through a stated point. Future prizes, later awards and any eventual own-bounty settlement remain outside it. Keep the time boundary visible instead of turning the carried display into current income.

At the end, reconcile confirmed ordinary prizes, actual bounty awards and all recorded entry costs. Check whether an entry total already includes fees before subtracting a fee again. Re-entries and separately charged items need their own source entries. The bounty worksheet does not estimate missing costs or convert its immediate-award column into a full tournament profit figure.

Treatment of the eventual winner’s own bounty belongs to the specific event’s rules and settlement record. Do not infer it from this Half-and-Half exercise or assume that every knockout variant handles it the same way. Our model stops at the selected confirmed opponent awards and leaves that final settlement out entirely.

Build the receipt from a bounded list of confirmed awards

The default inputs are starting carried bounty 40 and opponent bounties 60,100,20. Select Build receipt to see the immediate total 90.00, carried growth 90.00 and final carried amount 130.00. The event table records each split, cumulative immediate awards and carried amount after that event. On a narrow screen, the table can scroll horizontally.

Enter one through twenty positive opponent bounty amounts separated by commas. Each may be at most 1,000,000.00 and must split into two whole cents. Your starting carried amount may be zero through 1,000,000.00. These are worksheet limits for an exact calculation, not operator limits, event minimums or permitted real-world starting values.

Use a decimal point and up to two decimal places. Enter 40 or 40.00, without a currency symbol or a thousands separator. Commas separate awards, so an empty item such as 60,,100 is rejected. The error identifies the field to repair and returns focus there. No rounding choice is silently inserted to make an unsupported amount fit.

Changing either field clears the previous receipt. Reset example restores 40 and 60,100,20, clears the output and focuses the starting field. The worked receipt remains readable without JavaScript. No personal names, account details, hand-history upload or actual transaction is part of this exercise.

Keep a receipt that another reviewer can reconstruct

A useful study record names the rule profile and money unit, gives the starting carried amount and identifies each confirmed current opponent bounty. Preserve the immediate award, carried addition and resulting carried amount for each event. If a real record uses rounding, keep that convention beside it rather than forcing the amounts into this exercise’s narrower profile.

Check the conservation residual last. It is immediate awards + carried growth − selected opponent bounties. The worked sequence produces 0.00. A nonzero result in your own notes calls for checking the opening amount, duplicate entries, current-versus-starting bounty figures and the rule profile before drawing a conclusion about missing money.

Ace: “A zero residual means the tournament was profitable?” Indira: “It means this selected receipt balances. Entry costs, regular prizes and eligibility have their own records. Keep the conclusion as specific as the check.”

For a decision review, use the separate hand history review lesson. Other accounting exercises are listed in Info & Tools. Keep the award receipt and the strategy question side by side, with enough source information to tell which one you have actually answered.

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