Ocean KO

The one rule that makes it different

In any progressive knockout, part of each entry becomes the player's bounty and the rest goes to the prize pool. In a $10 Ocean KO, half the buy-in — $5 — becomes your starting bounty, $4.20 goes to the prize pool and $0.80 is the fee.

When you eliminate someone in a standard PKO, you collect half their bounty in cash and the other half is added to yours. Ocean KO inserts a step before that split: the eliminated player's bounty is multiplied by a random number first, and the result is then halved in the normal way.

So knocking out a player carrying a $5 bounty and hitting 10x produces $50 — $25 to you in cash, and your own bounty rises from $5 to $30. Hit the worst multiplier, 0.4x, on the same opponent and the bounty produces $2: a dollar to you, a dollar onto your head.

The four numbers worth knowing

The multiplier is drawn from a published table of nine values running from 0.4x to 400x, and four figures in it tell you most of what you need.

The mean is exactly 1.0000x. Each value multiplied by its probability sums to one, which is almost certainly deliberate: it lets GGPoker bolt a jackpot onto the format without taking anything extra out of it.

Seventy-two point three per cent of knockouts pay less than face value. The three lowest multipliers together are nearly three-quarters of all spins, so being underpaid for a knockout is the normal experience of the format rather than bad luck.

A multiplier of 10x or better arrives on 2.48 per cent of knockouts, roughly one in forty. The 400x top prize lands about once in every 50,000 bounties.

And the standard deviation of a single bounty payout is about 3.63 times its face value, against zero in a standard PKO where every bounty pays exactly what it says.

What it means for how you play

Your calling ranges should not move. This is the point most easily got wrong. Because the average multiplier is exactly 1x, the expected cash value of a bounty is exactly what it is in a standard PKO, so every calling threshold and covering consideration you already know carries over unchanged. Ocean KO is not a reason to call wider.

Your bankroll requirement should move. The same expected value now arrives through a far bumpier path, and a bankroll rule calibrated on flat bounty payouts is too thin for the same stakes here.

And your expectations about your own results should move. With three-quarters of spins paying below face value, a run of these will usually sit under its expectation, with the gap closed by rare large spins. A player who tracks results against the face value of the bounties they have collected will see a shortfall that is not a leak.

The tiers, and where the full numbers are

As your bounty grows it climbs fourteen named tiers, from Egg through Shrimp, Turtle and Dolphin to Shark, and then four Legendary tiers beginning at a $10,000 bounty where the multiplier range narrows sharply — down to 0.8x-1.5x for a Legendary Shark carrying $1,000,000 or more. GGPoker has published only the ranges for the Legendary tiers, not the probabilities inside them, so their expected value cannot be checked from public information.

The complete multiplier table with every probability, all fourteen tier thresholds and the comparison with Winamax's Space KO and Betclic's Smash KO are set out in our full Ocean KO guide in the news section.

Is it still poker?

Worth stating plainly. A random multiplier of up to 400x attached to an otherwise skill-based payout moves part of the prize money beyond the reach of good play, and nothing you do at the table influences which multiplier you draw. The counter-argument is that only the bounty half is randomised, the average is honestly set at 1x, and the table is published rather than hidden. Either way, a player should treat it as entertainment with a jackpot attached and size their play accordingly.