What happened
ACR Poker closed its Dual Mystery Bounty Venoms with 6,030 combined entries and $15.095 million in final prize pools, and the most efficient piece of decision-making across both events was a misclick. A player under the handle R88P meant to register for the $12 million guaranteed No-Limit Hold'em Venom and registered for the Pot-Limit Omaha Venom instead. They then finished 13th in the game they had not meant to enter and pulled the $250,000 top PLO Mystery Bounty, for $275,840.23 overall. The actual champions were Deltoid88, who beat Brazilian pro Ivan Limeira heads-up in the NLH event after a deal for $799,522.82 in prize money and $66,347.71 in bounties, and ImWinninAnyway, who took the PLO title for $365,192.14. The NLH field of 4,792 entries came in eight short of the number needed to fund its own guarantee, so ACR wrote a $20,000 overlay to round the prize pool up to $12 million. Somewhere below all of it, a player called LavenderBrown finished 348th, drew the $500,000 top bounty, and left with $508,220.48, of which $3,220.48 was for the poker. ACR pro Chance Kornuth reached both final tables at the same time and won neither, banking $188,734.88 for the effort.
Why it matters
Mystery bounties were sold to players as a way to make deep runs less binary, and this week they did that so thoroughly that finishing 348th out of 4,792 paid better than finishing second in most tournaments on the calendar. The format now rewards being present at the right moment more than it rewards being good, and the week's two clearest illustrations of that were a man who finished 348th and a man who was in the wrong lobby entirely. Kornuth played two final tables simultaneously, which is genuinely hard, and cleared less than either of them.
