POKER INFO

One of the most interesting developments in poker tournaments, especially the online variety, is the guaranteed prize pool. When card rooms and web sites advertise for tournaments with prize pools of “$1 Million Guaranteed”, players often jump at the chance to sign up. Intelligent, experienced players can take advantage of these situations in numerous ways, even before the tournament starts.

Weak players
Large prize pools inevitably bring throngs of weak players with stars in their eyes and dreams in their hearts. If you need any evidence, look at the expansion of the number of entrants in the World Series of Poker Main Event in the last few years. Online tournaments with high guaranteed prize pools, such as Full Tilt’s weekly $750K and monthly $1 million tournaments and PokerStars’ Poker Million routinely have fields well over ten thousand players.

Stair step satellites
Another method that both live card rooms and online poker sites use to encourage entries is the establishment of satellite tournaments. For those players who can’t afford to part with high entry fees, they can play in either one-table sit-n-gos or multi-table tourneys that offer entries to the bigger games as prizes. In the case of many online sites, they offer “super satellites” that are tourneys that offer satellite entries as prizes – a satellite into a bigger satellite – with buy-ins of $5 or less.

Overlay
In gambling terms, an overlay is a bet that gives a better payout than the odds would dictate. In poker tournaments, an overlay exists when the amount in the guaranteed prize pool is more than the total amount of buy-ins. For example, if a tournament guarantees a million-dollar prize pool, but the total amount of all the players’ buy-in money is only $900K, then the tournament offers a $100K overlay ($1M – $900K = $100K). While such opportunities are rare in the case of larger, more popular tournaments, some tourneys with smaller prize pools may offer “free money” to those who can find them.

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