$10.5 NLHE MTT Bounty: A spot in unique bounty tournament

Hi,

Since it's very relevant to this specific hand, I'll epxlain the tournament structure. It's an online bounty tournament with a unique structure. The buy-in is 10.5$ - 5$ goes to the prize pool, 5$ is for bounty and 0.5$ is rake.

You get the bounty prize for each player you eliminate, but not only his bounty but also all of the bounties that he earned during the tournament. The most important thing to know in order to understand this spot is that you actually recieve the bounty prize ONLY if you cash in the tournament. after the bubble the tournament is being held as a regular freezeout tourney with no bounty prizes for the players you bust.

Now for the hand:

There are 25 players left in the tournament, 23 will cash. I have a stack of 18 BB, currently ranked 12th and I have a bounty prize of 40$.

Villain is the chip-leader of the table, since it's the bubble he's playing hyper-aggressive and puts tons of pressure on the short stacks. In this hand he shoved from early position, everybody folded me, and I'm on the SB with Q-Q. Big blins is short (around 6-7 BB) and has a minimum bounty prize of 5$.

I realize that I crush villian's range, but should I take the risk of losing my guranteed 40$ prize, and let variance become a factor? Doubling up here will give me a huge boost for the tourney and the upcoming final table, but as far as I remember first prize was around 130-150$, less than 4 times from what I'm already guranteed just for making the money.

Should I call here or make a disciplined fold?

This is really an odd type of tournament but looks like it could be fun. Since you will lose $40.00 if you make this call I would make the disciplined fold. I would on the bubble in your position think of this as a satellite event. Just making into the money is what the goal should be at this time. Under any normal times I call but why risk the money you will get at this time?

It sounds like a fun tourny. I think you lay this down based on the fact you can't get a bounty on the hand. It is mighty disciplined, but probably your best option.

First, you will understand if you win with your QQ, you can get more than $40.
Second, as you say that the chip-leader is hyper-aggressive style.
You totally crush his range, I think that is what we want.

Relatively, you can always double up at this situation. When you IT M, you need more chip to beat other player, don't mind to lose this time, it's standard variance for MTT player. Cheer Up.

It actually really, really matters what the actual bubble is and how much is up top (say what are the top 3 spots getting paid?).

If it was a small bubble like maybe $10 cash and a large amount up top like $300-500, we're always taking this spot. There's still a chance at this stack depth that shorties double up and we are forced into much much worse spots that are mandatory, and the $40, while sort of a lot for a "min cash" isn't enough for me to avoid spots with the top 3 hands against a guy you have proclaimed as bullying the table. If you win this hand you'll get slightly more than a full double, and be in a REALLY good position to take down this tournament.

If somehow in addition to being a weird bounty structure, this was also a sattelite format where all payout spots are equal, then obviously we could snap fold this and feel great about it. But I don't think that's the case, and I'm guessing the payout structure is nowhere near that flat in the money.

Speculating on the tournament payout structure here: there are 23 spots paid, so I'm assuming something like 180 - 250 players. Let's just call it 200 for easy math. So 200 players putting in $5 each means the prize pool is about $1k, and I sort of assume first is only in the neighborhood of $200? And min cash is probably like $10-15?

So in reality our "min cash" is worth about $50, and if we won, we'd get ballpark $240 total? If that's accurate, it's definitely closer than I originally thought, but I'm still really struggling to find a fold here, but we'd need the full payout structure and plug this into ICMizer and maybe tweak the jamming ranges to know for sure.

I mean, ICMizer is still gonna tell you to go with it because you have QUEENS. But I'd be interested to see where it says the cutoff is. And if your bankroll is such that the $50 makes a big difference to you, I could see folding, but as long as you are adequately rolled for this game and format, you should never be folding.