The $3K PLO Mystery Bounty Is the Best PLO Tournament the WSOP Has Ever Scheduled

The WSOP just scheduled a $3,000 PLO Mystery Bounty with a $2 million guarantee, and if you play Pot-Limit Omaha tournaments at all, you should be clearing your calendar for July 3.

Event #65 — a $3,000 buy-in with a $2M guarantee — sits at the intersection of everything PLO tournament players have been asking for: a meaningful buy-in that isn't the $10K Championship, a mystery bounty format that rewards aggression, and a guarantee fat enough to attract a field full of recreational four-card junkies.

Three PLO events with combined guarantees north of $3.5 million are running in a single week at the WSOP — that has never happened before.

PLO Volume Like We've Never Seen

Look at what's on the schedule right now. Event #56, the $1,600 PLO with a $1M guarantee, fires its Day 1C on June 29. The BetMGM PLO Mystery Bounty — a $965 buy-in with a $500K guarantee — kicks off June 30. And then the $3K PLO Mystery Bounty lands on July 3.

Three PLO events. Combined guarantees of $3.5 million. In one week. The WSOP has never stacked this much PLO tournament equity into such a compressed window.

Why Event #65 Is the One

The $1,600 is a solid event, but a $1M guarantee at that price point means the field will be massive and top-heavy payouts will be modest relative to buy-in. The BetMGM event at $965 is a fun side dish. But the $3K hits a sweet spot: the buy-in is high enough to thin the herd of pure punters while keeping the door open for any serious PLO player. And the mystery bounty format means you're getting paid along the way — you don't need to survive to a final table to book a score.

Some will argue that PLO tournaments are still a variance nightmare — that the format rewards luck over skill more than NLHE. Sure. Every PLO tournament has more equity-close all-ins than its Hold'em equivalent. But that's exactly why the mystery bounty structure works so well here. Each bounty you pull offsets variance in real time. The format and the game are a natural fit.

The Bigger Picture

The WSOP doesn't put $2M guarantees on events out of charity. They're reading the room — the PLO cash-game ecosystem has been booming for years, and tournament entries are finally catching up. A $3K PLO Mystery Bounty with this kind of backing signals that the series believes PLO can carry main-event-level interest at the mid-stakes.

If Event #65 crushes its guarantee, expect more of this in 2027. If it doesn't, the experiment stalls. Either way, July 3 is the most important date on the PLO calendar this summer.