The $250 Mystery Millions bracelet event at the 2026 WSOP Online has produced one of the series' signature results, with a Russian player listed in the GGPoker lobby as Aleksandr Kropotov — playing under the alias "sasha1317!" — dominating the final table to win $631,459 and a WSOP bracelet. Event #17 pulled 47,798 entries across dozens of Day 1 flights and built a $10,993,540 prize pool, making it one of the largest online bracelet fields of the year.
Kropotov's run was as emphatic as the headline number suggests. He eliminated all but one of his opponents at the nine-handed final table, closing out seven of the eight bustouts himself before finishing off Canada's Jessica Moors heads-up. Like every champion among the 33 bracelet events on the 2026 WSOP Online schedule, he also banked a $30,000 Super Pass into the $50 million guaranteed Super Main Event at WSOP Paradise.
The Numbers Behind the Result
The mystery bounty element had already delivered its biggest moment before the final table convened. The $1 million jackpot bounty was claimed on Day 2 by a player showing as "DrAvacado," at a stage where the 4,083 returning entrants were being ground down to the final nine.
With bounty payments folded in, eight of the nine finalists walked away with six figures. Only Ukraine's Denys Chufarin missed out, and only narrowly — he arrived as the shortest stack, departed first, and still collected $85,282.
$250 Mystery Millions Final Table Results
| Rank | Player | Country | Bounties | Prize | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aleksandr Kropotov | Russia | $24,530 | $606,929 | $631,459 |
| 2 | Jessica Moors | Canada | $13,730 | $466,430 | $480,160 |
| 3 | Oliver Bosch | Austria | $3,380 | $359,668 | $363,048 |
| 4 | Mikhail Suy | Kazakhstan | $5,970 | $277,343 | $283,313 |
| 5 | Norman Schreck | Germany | $6,890 | $213,863 | $220,753 |
| 6 | Eric Bonin | Mexico | $142,050 | $164,913 | $306,963 |
| 7 | Gay Peng Tan | Malaysia | $5,320 | $127,166 | $132,486 |
| 8 | Francisco Zufia | Andorra | $3,630 | $98,061 | $101,691 |
| 9 | Denys Chufarin | Ukraine | $9,665 | $75,617 | $85,282 |
Countries as listed in the GGPoker lobby.
Look down the bounty column and the format's entire logic jumps off the page. Eric Bonin busted in sixth for a $164,913 placement prize, yet went home with $306,963 because he had pulled $142,050 in mystery bounty payments — nearly six times what the eventual champion collected in bounties. Bonin's finishing position was worth roughly half of third-place money; his total was comfortably more. Francisco Zufia finished eighth with $3,630 in bounties, while Chufarin finished ninth with $9,665. The bounty draw scrambled the payout ladder in a way no conventional structure ever could.
How Mystery Bounties Change the Math
In a classic progressive knockout, every bounty has a known face value, so you can price a call precisely: you are risking chips for a fixed, visible cash prize plus half of it added to your own head. Mystery bounties break that certainty on purpose. You know the average value of a bounty envelope, but not the value of the specific one you are about to win. Somewhere in the pool sits a $1 million jackpot and a handful of other outsized prizes, and the vast majority of envelopes are worth the minimum.
This distinction matters more than casual players realise. Because the big prizes are rare and enormous, the average bounty value is dragged well above the median. Most of the time you knock someone out and receive the smallest envelope — the modest bounty totals for Bosch, Zufia and Tan are exactly that outcome. But you must price your decisions off the average, not the typical result, which means the correct play often feels wrong in the moment and only pays off across a very large sample.
The second structural quirk is that the bounties in most mystery formats do not activate until a specific point in the tournament, usually the start of Day 2 or the money bubble. Before that trigger, the event behaves like an ordinary multi-table tournament and standard survival considerations apply in full. After it, a slice of the prize pool that was previously locked away becomes claimable purely by eliminating opponents, and correct strategy shifts sharply.
ICM and Push/Fold Ranges After the Trigger
Once bounties are live, chips and money decouple further than usual. Standard ICM pressure says that risking your stack is expensive because tournament chips have declining marginal value — doubling up does not double your equity. Mystery bounties push in the opposite direction, adding a cash component that is realised the instant a covered opponent busts and is not subject to ICM decay at all.
The practical consequence is that calling ranges widen substantially against shorter stacks you cover, while shoving ranges widen less than players assume. The asymmetry catches people out. Winning a bounty requires you to cover the opponent and eliminate them, so it is the caller with chips who gets paid, not the shover. Jamming a marginal hand into a big stack gains you no bounty equity whatsoever — you are simply donating fold equity to someone who now has an extra reason to call you light.
Three adjustments follow from that. Call wider when you cover a short stack and the pot is heads-up. Tighten up when you are the short stack looking for spots, because everyone behind you is calling looser than the chip-EV chart suggests. And weight multiway pots differently: when two opponents can both bust a third, the bounty equity is split across the field in ways that make isolating a short stack more valuable than letting a pot go three-handed. If those trade-offs are unfamiliar, our poker strategy section and the primer on pot odds are the right foundations to build on before you fire a mystery bounty event with real money at stake.
Why Operators Love the Format
From a commercial standpoint, the appeal is obvious. A $250 buy-in that attracts 47,798 entries and pays out nearly $11 million needs a hook, and "any player could win $1 million from a single knockout" is a far better hook than an incremental increase in the guarantee. The jackpot is funded out of the same prize pool players contributed, so the operator is not adding money — it is redistributing it into a shape that markets itself.
The format also flatters recreational players in a way that pure tournament structures do not. A player who busts in 400th place from a field of 47,798 normally takes home a token min-cash and a bad memory. In a mystery bounty, that same player might have drawn a five-figure envelope on the way out. That possibility keeps mid-field runs meaningful and drives the re-entry behaviour that inflates these fields in the first place. It is no accident that virtually every major site now runs mystery bounty series, and that the format has become a fixture of the promotional calendar alongside standard welcome offers and bonus campaigns.
What This Means for Players
If you are drawn to the format — and the marketing is designed to make sure you are — treat it as a tournament with two distinct phases rather than a lottery. Play the pre-trigger stage as a normal deep-field MTT, then deliberately widen your calling ranges once bounties activate. Do not chase the jackpot. It is a single envelope in a pool of tens of thousands, and no strategic adjustment meaningfully improves your odds of drawing it.
Expect variance to be higher than the buy-in suggests, because a meaningful slice of your expected return sits in rare, high-value outcomes you will mostly not hit. That argues for a slightly deeper bankroll allocation than an equivalent regular tournament, and for treating mystery bounty results as noisy over anything short of a very large sample. The more general question of whether this style of play suits you at all is worth a read of our cash games vs tournaments breakdown before you commit a series schedule's worth of buy-ins to it.
Kropotov's $631,459 and DrAvacado's $1 million jackpot are what the format looks like from the top. The rest of that final table — Bonin's $142,050 in bounties against a sixth-place finish, Chufarin's $85,282 for ninth — is the more instructive picture of how the money actually moves.