I am sure you've heard of guaranteed prize money tournaments. There's the "Sunday Million" at Stars, and the $100,000 Guaranteed at Absolute. No matter how many players show up to these events, the prize pool is guaranteed to be at least as big as advertised.
$100,000 guaranteed - Every Day
Usually there are enough players in the tournament to cover the posted prize pool total. But sometimes, the player count comes up short. In those instances, the room has to make up the difference. That, is called an overlay.
I've seen overlays at some of the smaller rooms. For instance, Naked Poker was hosting $100 guaranteed tournaments with $2 buy-ins, and there would be 30 players for the event. The house had to literally cover almost half the stated prize pool. Percentage-wise, that's a huge overlay. In actual dollars, it was forty bucks.
Absolute has been running daily guaranteed money events, and for a while they had overextended themselves, having to regularly post money to make up the difference between the entry fees and the guarantee.
Those kinds of tournaments are nice when you happen upon them, but they aren't something I would stay up until midnight to try to get into. But, there are some HUGE overlays going on that ARE worth the time and energy spent to chase them.
Mansion Poker is running a tournament series where they host a $100,000 guaranteed tournament, every day! Which, is great news since they're having trouble enough players to cover the guarantee. According to Cardplayer, they've been getting roughly 500 players a night. That, is a $50,000 overlay - every night!If you're a serious tournament player, you should be licking your chops right now.
The other room that is running a sizeable guarantee that is in need of players is Bodog. They have a weekly $70,000 guarantee that runs on Tuesday nights. And, they seem to have been forced to kick in ten(s) of thousands of house money to bring the prize pool up to status.
Those two oppotunities are worth writing about, but they aren't things that are likely to last. Either the house gets tired of kicking in the extra cash on a consistent basis, or players hear about it and start showing up, eventually in numbers large enough to destroy the overlay.
This page last updated January 31st, 2007.
