Overlay Poker Tournaments

Why Play Low Stakes Overlay Tournaments?

The best thing that an MTT player like yourself or I can come across in online poker is an overlay tournament.  I think people tend to undervalue overlay tournaments nowdays, and I know many players who would rather grind the $30k GTD games at Full Tilt Poker for a remote chance of a playoff.  In my opinion though, playing in low stakes overlay tournaments are the best step for building a bankroll from $100 to $1,00 (or that level in general). 

Best Room for Overlay Tournaments: Bodog Poker

Bonus: 10% Instant Deposit Bonus plus 110% up to $1,100!

Bodog Poker is completely full of overlay tournaments, and you can MTTs there from just $1 or $2 in buy-ins, which I gives you much more attempts and value for money then you’d get else where.  Let’s say you’re rolled at $200.  I think that if you played at Bodog you might finish ITM at least 30% of the time and make an ROI of 20% at minimum.  I’m not saying you should stop playing at PokerStars completely, but I don’t I don’t see how it could hurt to give yourself a chance of doubling your roll in just a few MTTs by playing at Bodog.  Just finishing ahead of 100 other opponents on the final table of one of Bodog’s daily $1,000 or $2,000 GTD can be worth up to $100.

 I can think of so many times when I was just browsing Bodog’s software and a juicy small buy-in overlay caught my attention.  If you really want to cash out in the next week than I sincerely recommend playing there.  Bodog is sort of like an undiscovered gold mine at the moment and the MTTs are popping with fish and new players.  I actually took the initiative and registered for the $5 buy-in tourney and made a final table finish worth a few hundred dollars.  The event only had just over 100 entrants and finished in just a few hours. Compare that to the thousands of entrants that you’d expect in a similar MTT at PokerStars or UB.

What is an Overlay Poker Tournament?

An overlay poker tournament is when the number of entrants in a guaranteed prizepool tournament doesn’t cover the costs of the poker room, rhe poker room then has to fullfill the remaining prizepool.  Overlay tournaments are brilliant for players because they epitomise added value.  Low fields + big prizepool equals a big pay day and the best return on your bankroll. 

Overlay Tournaments at Bodog

Bodog Poker is without a doubt the best site for overlay tournaments, and this is coming from a guy who’s done his research playing MTTs at Sportsbook poker, Doyles Room and Titan Poker etc.  Bodog has hundreds of low stakes MTT tournaments running each day from $0 – $10 buy-in.  These are the type of stakes that I think that the majority of my traffic should be around.  Anyway,  after I viewed the lobby and Bodog’s recent tournament news, I found that over 70% of Bodog’s guaranteed multi-table tournmens events contain overlays.  This is far bigger than any other site, it seems that  Bodog runs these overlzy games intentionally as a means of picking up and attracting new tournament players. 

$100k GTD Overlay Tournament

The biggest regular overlay MTT in online poker is Bodog’s $100k Sunday Guaranteed.  This event only attracts 500 players on average which leads to a massive overlay worth more than $20,000.  I think I’m right in saying this is the biggest weekly overlay tournaments online.  Back in September 2009, the $100k GTD tourney received even less entrants at only 400, which meant there was a staggering $40k overlay.

In addition to added value tournaments, Bodog’s MTTs are also very weak which are composed of lots of bad players that hop over from the sportsbook.  Imagine a bunch of fish playing hands like J7 in the early stages of a tournaments – this makes the games super profitable to play.  Beginners can even check out the Bodog Beginner Tournaments and daily $1500 freerolls.  For more serious tournament players Bodog even run their own Bodog Mini-Series (albeit this has nothing on the FTOPS).  This is a series of tournaments that is loosely based on the world series of poker but it adjusted for low stakes players, with 13x $10 MTTs, a total prizepool of $40,000 and nice MTT leaderboard prize for the top 30% of players.

Play Overlay Tournaments at Bodog