Overlay

Man, I love overlay. There was a time when I wouldn't play any MTTs online unless there was overlay. Many times I joined a tournament early when it looked like there was going to be overlay, just to have a ton of people join at the last minute to ruin it.

For those who don't know, overlay is money on top of the prize pool contributed by the players. Usually in online tournaments these are guaranteed prize pools, and they only come into effect when not enough people sign up for the tourney. If there's a $2000 guaranteed tournament that has a $20 buy in, if there's less than 100 people in the tourney, there's overlay.

This thing The Online Series of Poker has a TON of overlay.

There's 10 tournaments, and all the prize money, minus the fees, goes into the prize pool. Then there's $10,500 for the tournament leader board....that's overlay. Then there's a $100,000 prize added and a free trip for the 10 winners to Atlantic City from anywhere in the world.

The buy-ins are steep but reasonable. Five online poker rooms will host two tournaments each, $100+9 and $250+20. I don't see how they will make up enough in fees to pay for the overlay, but I guess they figure it's worth it to get customers to sign up for all five rooms. The ten winners get the free trip to the Taj to play in a STT, even the last place player gets $5000....HUGE overlay.

Even cooler, all five rooms have promotions available via Poker Source Online So you can do the promotions at PSO at all these rooms, and THEN sign up for this thing. (Use referral code DuggleBogey at PSO if you sign up there.)

I will probably play in the $100+9 tourneys at Absolute and Party Poker, I'm not sure about the $250+20s. Although if the field size is a lot smaller, it might be a better idea to do those instead of the $109s. If I join any of the other rooms before their events, I might play those too.

This could be a really big deal in the Online Poker world. One of the reasons live poker is attracting me less and less is because Online Poker is offering more and more.