GGPOKER

Most poker series crown a champion. The Bounty Hunters Series pays you for every opponent you send home along the way.

GGPoker ran the 2024 edition from July 7 through July 29, hanging $50 million in guarantees on a schedule built entirely around the knockout format. Every event carried bounties, a $1 million leaderboard paid out the top 2,000 grinders every single day, and the whole thing pointed toward a $4 million Mystery MILLION$ Main Event that swapped the usual single jackpot for ten separate $100,000 bounties. The premise is simple and a little addictive: the money is not only waiting at the final table. It is sitting on the head of everyone you knock out. By GGPoker’s own running tally, players had already banked more than $7.5 million in the series’ first two days.

When the Bounty Beats the Trophy

That premise produced the same delicious absurdity all month. Take the opening Sunday Showdown. Vitalii Buts won it for $31,044. But 50th-place ‘Juninn’, long gone before the prize money got interesting, had collected $60,234 in bounties, nearly double the champion’s payday.

It was not a fluke. In a later Sunday Showdown, ‘DoBronx99’ busted 102nd and unwrapped a $50,000 mystery bounty. ‘Daniel Camacho’ went out 61st in another and found $50,000 of his own. The $150 midweek events told the same story on a smaller scale, with ‘Ronald_Reagan’ turning a 111th-place finish into $29,825, ‘StratoPrince’ banking $29,150 from 38th, and ‘TodoBoom’ pulling $25,666 out of 36th. ‘Maxim Pak’ and ‘PrCharlesXavier’ did the same in their own midweek events, banking $25,438 and $26,600 without ever threatening the trophy. Even a deal could not contain it: ‘JossTheBoss9’ finished sixth in a Saturday Secret KO for a modest $4,440 in prize money, then walked with $18,580 in bounties. Over and over, the biggest score in the room belonged to someone who had already lost.

The Biggest Hauls

The players who went deep and hunted well did best of all. ‘BulteeK’ took the Weekend 3 High Roller Main Event, a $525 tournament with a $1.28 million pool, and stacked $58,124 in bounties on top of a $62,803 first prize. The combined $120,927 stood as the largest single haul of the series.

A week earlier, ‘A Lasouskii’ had won the same High Roller Main through a heads-up chop, and it was a $55,704 bounty haul, more than triple his chopping partner’s, that decided who really won the night. ‘ZecaGeleilate’ opened the series by taking the first High Roller Main for roughly $85,000 all told, and in the Global MILLION$ Bounty Edition, the series’ largest field, ‘Clark Kent’ outlasted 30,937 entrants for a combined $72,000. Down a rung, the $320 GGMasters Bounty Special Editions were quietly generous too, with ‘Busta Neps’ collecting $43,522 across prize and bounties in week one and ‘Ilya Kurgalov’ nearly matching it a weekend later for $39,113. The High Roller Classic showed just how lopsided the math could run: ‘Puntti’ won it for $35,659, and $20,509 of that came from bounties alone, more than the trophy was worth.

Volume, Every Single Day

Underneath the headline scores ran a relentless daily grind. The $54 Bounty Hunters Sunday Main Event drew fields that flirted with twenty thousand week after week, peaking at 17,869 entrants on the final Sunday, and four separate Daily Mains ran every weekday, each with its own bounty pool to raid. Those came in four flavors, Deepstack, Double Stack, Classic, and 6-Max, and rotated through a cast of winners like ‘Kevin_Malone’, ‘JudasPriest’, and ‘G28S’, most of them clearing north of $23,000 once the knockouts were counted. The format rewarded the specialists who understood it: ‘HoH Shin’ won a Tuesday Classic and took home $12,104 in bounties, which the recap noted was more than fifteen percent of every bounty in the tournament.

The $1 million leaderboard tied it all together, paying the top 2,000 players every day the series was live, so consistency counted for as much as any single deep run. This was a festival built for the grinder as much as the high-stakes specialist, with a knockout to collect no matter what a player sat down to play.

The Marquee Results

A selection of the biggest events and hauls from the series’ three-week run:

Event	Buy-in	Entries	Winner	Prize (+ bounty)
Bounty Hunters HR Main Event (Wknd 3)	$525	2,575	‘BulteeK’	$62,803.15 (+$58,124.44 bounty)
Bounty Hunters HR Main Event (Wknd 2)	$525	2,055	‘A Lasouskii’ (chop)	$51,693.51 (+$55,704.04 bounty)
Bounty Hunters HR Main Event (Wk 1)	$525	2,095	‘ZecaGeleilate’	$52,749.80 (+$32,512.27 bounty)
Global MILLION$ Bounty Edition	$50	30,937	‘Clark Kent’	$43,016.81 (+$29,123.07 bounty)
Bounty Hunters Sunday Main Event (Wknd 3)	$54	17,869	‘leaderout’	$31,468.28 (+$18,568.18 bounty)
Bounty Hunters Sunday Main Event (Wk 1)	$54	16,355	‘P Lavecchia’	$29,092.78 (+$18,244.03 bounty)
GGMasters Bounty Special Edition	$320	1,205	‘Busta Neps’	$20,214.76 (+$23,308.14 bounty)
Sunday Showdown [Mystery Bounty] (Wk 1)	$108	6,110	Vitalii Buts	$31,044 (top bounty $60,234 to 50th)
Sunday Showdown [Mystery Bounty] (Wknd 3)	$108	6,734	‘rico 888’ (chop)	$26,096.96 (bounty $50,000 to 102nd)
HR Main [Classic]	$525	408	‘Puntti’	$35,659.14 (incl. $20,509.80 bounty)
Tuesday Classic [Bounty Edition]	$150	1,166	‘HoH Shin’	$9,010.75 (+$12,104.72 bounty)

The Bounty Hunters Series has always sold one particular fantasy: that busting an opponent is its own reward, sometimes a larger one than winning the whole thing. For three weeks in July, GGPoker kept proving it true, one $50,000 envelope and one blindsided champion at a time. The series would be back the next summer, bigger again. The format has never needed changing.

 

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About the Author: Shawn Altbaum has been writing and editing in the online gaming industry since 2007, reporting live from the WSOP Main Event and conducting interviews with professional players. An active poker player, he combines industry expertise with firsthand knowledge of the games he covers. He currently serves as Global Head of Copywriting at NSUS Group, overseeing brand voice and content strategy across GGPoker and GGVegas.