How to play Ocean KO: the full pay table, the fourteen tiers, and what actually changes

Ocean KO is a progressive knockout with one extra step, and that step is the whole format. Before a bounty is paid out, it is multiplied by a randomly drawn figure. Everything else behaves like the PKO you already know.

This is the reference version: the complete pay table, every tier, and what the numbers mean for how you should play. The launch and the world-record field are covered separately in our news report on the format's first ten days.

Where the money sits before a card is dealt

Half of each buy-in becomes your bounty. In a $10 Ocean KO that is $5 on your head, $4.20 into the prize pool and $0.80 as the fee.

When you eliminate someone, their bounty is multiplied first, and the result is then split the ordinary progressive way: half paid to you in cash, half added to the bounty on your own head. The order matters, because the multiplier decides both what you are paid and how big a target you become.

A worked example. You knock out a player carrying a $5 bounty and draw 10x. That creates $50. You bank $25 and your own bounty rises from $5 to $30. Draw 0.4x on the same player and the bounty creates $2 — a dollar to you, a dollar onto your head.

The complete pay table

Nine multipliers, with the cash figures worked through on a $5 bounty. The cash column is half of each spin, because the other half goes onto your own bounty.

400x — the bounty becomes $2,000, and $1,000 is paid to you. Probability 0.002 per cent, about one knockout in 50,000.

100x — the bounty becomes $500, and $250 is paid to you. Probability 0.08 per cent.

10x — the bounty becomes $50, and $25 is paid to you. Probability 2.40 per cent.

2x — the bounty becomes $10, and $5 is paid to you. Probability 2.50 per cent.

1.5x — the bounty becomes $7.50, and $3.75 is paid to you. Probability 2.70 per cent.

1x — the bounty stays at $5, and $2.50 is paid to you. Probability 20.00 per cent.

0.7x — the bounty becomes $3.50, and $1.75 is paid to you. Probability 22.00 per cent.

0.5x — the bounty becomes $2.50, and $1.25 is paid to you. Probability 26.228 per cent.

0.4x — the bounty becomes $2, and $1 is paid to you. Probability 24.09 per cent.

The four numbers that matter

The mean multiplier is exactly 1.0000x. Multiply each value by its probability and the column sums to one. That 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 0.4x, 0.5x and 0.7x rows together are nearly three-quarters of all spins. Being underpaid for a knockout is the normal experience of this format, not bad luck.

A multiplier of 10x or better arrives on 2.48 per cent of knockouts, roughly one in forty. A hundred-times or better is about one in 1,220.

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

The fourteen tiers

As your bounty grows it climbs a ladder of named tiers. The thresholds below are the published ones for a $10 buy-in and scale with the buy-in. All ten standard tiers use the same 0.4x-to-400x table above.

Egg starts at a $5 bounty, Fry at $6, Fish at $7, Shrimp at $10, Crab at $15, Turtle at $25, Octopus at $50, Dolphin at $100, Whale at $200 and Shark at $500.

Above that sit four Legendary tiers, set at fixed cash amounts rather than multiples of the buy-in, and the multiplier range narrows sharply at each one. Legendary Octopus begins at a $10,000 bounty and runs 0.5x to 50x. Legendary Dolphin begins at $50,000 and runs 0.6x to 10x. Legendary Whale begins at $250,000 and runs 0.65x to 2.5x. Legendary Shark, at $1,000,000 or more, runs only 0.8x to 1.5x.

That narrowing is the sensible part of the design — a 400x spin on a million-dollar bounty would be a $400,000,000 payout, so the ceiling has to come down as the numbers climb. One caveat worth knowing before you play a big one: 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.

Strategy: what does not change

Your calling ranges. This is the point most easily got wrong, and getting it wrong is expensive.

Because the average multiplier is exactly 1x, the expected cash value of a bounty is exactly what it is in a standard PKO. Every calling threshold you already know, every covering consideration, every piece of PKO maths carries over unchanged. The 400x on the ceiling is not a reason to call wider — it is already priced into the average, and the price of it is the 72 per cent of spins that pay under face value.

The rest of PKO strategy applies as written too. You can still only collect a bounty if you cover the opponent and their whole stack is at risk, so chips still have the extra value they have in any progressive knockout. Short stacks with big bounties are still the targets. Your own growing bounty still makes you one.

Strategy: what does change

Your bankroll requirement. In a standard PKO the bounty component of your results has no variance at all. Here it has a standard deviation of about 3.63 times face value per knockout, and that compounds across a session and across a series. A bankroll rule calibrated on flat bounty payouts is too thin for the same stakes in Ocean KO.

Your expectations about your own results. With three-quarters of spins paying below face value, a run of Ocean KOs will usually sit under its expectation, with the gap closed by rare large spins that may not arrive for a long time. A player who tracks results against the face value of the bounties they have collected will see a shortfall that is not a leak. Knowing that in advance is what stops it becoming a reason to start playing badly.

Late-stage dynamics, probably. A single large spin can move a meaningful share of the bounty pool onto one stack, which may change how the endgame plays. Nobody has quantified that yet, so treat it as a known unknown rather than a solved adjustment.

How it compares with the French and Spanish originals

Ocean KO is GGPoker's version of a format that already existed. Winamax deals it as Space KO and Betclic as Smash KO; GGPoker is the third operator to offer one and the first outside France and Spain.

Its table is the most extreme of the three at both ends. The top multiplier is 400x against Winamax's 100x and Betclic's 50x, and the chance of 10x or better is 2.48 per cent against 0.60 per cent at both competitors. But GGPoker also has the highest share of below-face-value spins, 72.32 per cent against 60.00 per cent and 49.85 per cent. The mechanism is in the detail: GGPoker added 0.5x and 0.7x rows, dropped the 3x, and its worst multiplier of 0.4x lands on 24 per cent of knockouts where Winamax's lands on 60 per cent.

In short, GGPoker spread the small disappointments more thinly and bought a much bigger jackpot with them.

Is it still poker?

Worth stating plainly rather than burying. A random multiplier of up to 400x attached to an otherwise skill-based payout moves part of the prize money out of 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 pay table is published rather than hidden. Where you come down on that is a matter of taste. What a player should not do is mistake the variance for an edge: the format is entertainment with a jackpot attached, and it should be sized as such.

Before you register

Check which tier your bounty starts in and what the buy-in split is, because the tier thresholds scale with the buy-in. Check whether the event is a flighted multi-day, since the biggest Ocean KOs run dozens of starting flights into a single Day 2. And remember that the published table covers the ten standard tiers only.

One sourcing note, in the interest of being straight about it. GGPoker's own public pages do not serve the Ocean KO rules or pay table to an ordinary page request — the format appears in its Featured Events menu with nothing behind it. The figures here come from the trade press: Pokerfuse, sourced to Poker Industry PRO, with the multiplier table independently reproduced by PrimeDope, and the two agree exactly. Both are credited in full in the sources below. The authoritative version is the structure shown in the client's own event lobby, and anyone planning to play a large Ocean KO should check it there.