$3,000 Five-Card PLO Bounty Fires June 23 With $300K Guarantee

Five-card PLO with bounties and a $300K guarantee starts June 23 — and if you thought four-card PLO pots were absurd, wait until you see what a fifth card does to the equity runouts.

This is Event #48 on the schedule, a $3,000 buy-in ($1,730 after the bounty carve-out), and there's nothing else quite like it running this summer. The format is designed to produce mayhem. Five hole cards mean tighter equity spreads preflop, more wraps, more nut-nut possibilities — and bounties mean players have a direct incentive to punt into those spots anyway.

Five hole cards mean tighter equity spreads preflop, more wraps, more nut-nut possibilities — and bounties mean players have a direct incentive to punt into those spots anyway.

Why This Is Worth Watching

Five-card PLO is already a high-variance game. Add a bounty structure and a $300K guarantee, and you've got a field full of action players who came specifically to gamble. Nobody satellites into a $3K 5-card PLO bounty. The people who register this event want to play big pots.

The equity math alone makes it fascinating. In four-card PLO, flopping a bare set against a wrap-plus-flush-draw is already a sweat. Add a fifth card and almost every hand connects with almost every board. Runouts that would be routine in Hold'em become coin-flip catastrophes.

What to Look For

If coverage is available on June 23, keep an eye on two things:

• Bounty hunting vs. survival. The tension between stacking bounties and protecting your own creates the most interesting strategic layer in any bounty format — and 5-card PLO amplifies it because stacks go in faster.
• Preflop sizing. In 5-card PLO, the gap between a "good" hand and a "great" hand narrows dramatically. Watch how players adjust their open sizes — or don't.

Cards in the air at 1:00 p.m. PT on June 23. Clear the second monitor.