GGPoker’s Ocean KO Debut Tops $1 Million in Guarantees
The first three jackpot PKO events brought in more than 30,000 entries and $1.4 million in prize pools on Oct. 4.
GGPoker’s new Ocean KO jackpot progressive knockout format cleared its first test on Sunday, Oct. 4, as all three debut tournaments beat their guarantees. The $10, $100 and $1,000 events attracted 30,061 entries in total and generated just over $1.4 million in prize pools, against $1 million guaranteed.
The launch followed GGPoker’s Oct. 2 announcement and put the format into the Bounty Hunters Series. The $10 tournament accounted for 23,443 entries and a $215,700 prize pool, exceeding its $200,000 guarantee. The $100 event drew 5,926 entries for a $545,200 pool, while the $1,000 tournament brought in 692 entries and built a $657,400 pool. Each of those two higher-buy-in events had a $400,000 guarantee.
Ocean KO combines the usual progressive-knockout structure with a random bounty multiplier on every elimination. Half of each buy-in becomes a player’s bounty, with the balance split between the regular prize pool and fee. In a $10 event, for example, $5 funds the bounty, $4.20 goes to the prize pool and 80 cents is the fee.
When a player makes a knockout, half of the multiplied bounty is paid in cash and the other half is added to that player’s own bounty. A $5 bounty hit by a 10x multiplier becomes $50, paying $25 immediately and adding $25 to the eliminator’s bounty. That creates a $30 bounty for the player after starting at $5.
The multiplier range runs from 0.4x to 400x, and GGPoker says a single Ocean KO bounty can reach $1.5 million. The top 400x result is rare, occurring about once in every 50,000 bounties, while 10x lands 2.4% of the time. More than 72% of knockouts pay less than the bounty’s face value, although Pokerfuse’s format guide says the full multiplier table averages exactly 1x over the long run.
Ocean KO is the first jackpot PKO offered outside France and Spain, according to Pokerfuse. The format began with Winamax’s Space KO in December 2024 and later reached Betclic through Smash KO. Ocean KO’s maximum multiplier is four times Space KO’s 100x ceiling and eight times Smash KO’s 50x maximum.
The earlier formats showed how a knockout can dwarf a conventional tournament finish. One €100 Space KO event with an €80,000 guarantee paid more than €1 million in total, including an €838,000 bounty from a single elimination, while the winner’s first-place prize was just over €5,000.
Ocean KO has 14 bounty-evolution tiers. The first 10 can produce multipliers up to 400x, while four Legendary levels use flatter tables as bounties grow. Legendary Octopus begins at $10,000, and Legendary Shark applies to bounties of at least $1 million, with payouts ranging from 0.8x to 1.5x.
The random outcomes have also prompted concerns for players using staking or backing deals. Poker pro Patrick Leonard said the format makes those arrangements “very very very messy,” arguing that a few bounty-wheel results can swing a backed player’s tournament outcome heavily.
Ocean KO remains part of the $100 million guaranteed Bounty Hunters Series, which runs through Oct. 27. A $5 Ocean KO Opener carries a $1 million guarantee and has its Day 2 on Oct. 12; a $25 Ocean KO with a $2 million guarantee reaches Day 2 on Oct. 19.
