PokerNews Cup at Golden Nugget Smashes Records; Largest Prize Pool in Venue History
Mystery bounty tournaments are fun and popular. The 2023 PokerNews Cup, an $1,100 buy-in event at Golden Nugget in Las Vegas set a tournament record with 2,331 entrants, and completely obliterated the $1 million guaranteed prize pool.
When registration closed on Saturday, the pot had reached $2,261,070, crushing last year's impressive prize pool of just over $1.2 million. Gary Gelman took down the then-record 1,245-player field in 2022 for $202,725. This year's champion, to be crowned on Monday, will receive $218,605 along with all the bounties the unknown-at-this-time player collects throughout the tournament.
Mystery Bounty Action is Intense
On top of the traditional prize pool, this year's PokerNews Cup features a mystery bounty component, which is quickly becoming one of the most popular poker tournament formats. When a player busts starting on Day 2, the player with the winning hand receives an envelope with a mystery bounty amount hidden inside.
In the PokerNews Cup, there are two $100,000 grand prize mystery bounties. Well, there *were* two of them, but now there's only one as a player already pulled the first one on Sunday. Additionally, one of the two $50,000 bounties have been claimed as of the time of publishing, and one of the two $75,000 bounties remained undiscovered.
Most of the bounties are between $500 and $6,000, but it's always quite an adrenaline rush opening up an envelope to find out if you've just won life-changing money. Of course, even if a player doesn't pull one of the big bounties, there's still an opportunity to earn a six-figure payday the old-fashioned way — in the poker tournament.
PokerNews is on-hand at the Golden Nugget live reporting the entire event from start to finish. Additionally, on Day 2, you can catch our live-stream from the Fremont Street casino on our YouTube channel.
