An overlay is the clearest edge in online poker. It happens when a tournament's guaranteed prize pool is larger than the buy-ins collected to fund it, so the site pays the shortfall out of its own pocket. That added money raises the expected value of every seat in the field, and you did not have to do anything to earn it except be registered.
The catch is finding overlays before late registration closes. At any moment there can be 200 or more tournaments running across a dozen networks, and an overlay can open and close within minutes as players pile in near the deadline. So the real question is not "what is an overlay" but "what actually helps me find them in time." This guide maps the tools players reach for, what each one is built to do, and where each falls short for overlay detection specifically.
Before comparing tools, it helps to fix the rubric. To catch an overlay you need five things at once:
Most tools poker players already own were built for a different job. Here is how the common ones actually line up.
| Tool or approach | What it is built for | Detects live overlay across sites? |
|---|---|---|
| Watching the lobby yourself | Reading one site's schedule at a time | Only where you are looking, one site at a time |
| Trackers and HUDs (PokerTracker 4, Hold'em Manager 3, Hand2Note) | Analyzing your own hands and opponent tendencies | No, they read your play, not lobby guarantees |
| Results databases (SharkScope, The Hendon Mob) | Field strength and player history | No, they show how tough a field is, not whether it is overlaying now |
| Traffic sites (PokerScout) | Player counts and network traffic | Partly, as context, but not a per-tournament overlay figure |
| Live-room listings (PokerAtlas) | Casino and live tournament schedules | No, these are mostly brick-and-mortar events |
| Community intel (2+2 threads, poker Discords, shared spreadsheets) | Crowd-sourced tips | Sometimes, but coverage is partial and the projects come and go |
| Purpose-built scanning (Profitmaxxer) | Real-time overlay and late-reg detection | Yes, this is the specific job it does |
This is the default, and it is free. It is also where the leak lives. To cover the field by hand you would need to watch four or more lobbies spanning 200-plus tournaments for most of the day, doing the guarantee math on each while you are also playing your own tables. Overlays open and close in the minutes you are folding a hand somewhere else. Manual checking works for the one tournament in front of you and misses almost everything else.
PokerTracker 4, Hold'em Manager 3 and Hand2Note are excellent at what they do, which is importing your hand histories and putting opponent stats on your table. That is a different problem from overlay detection. They read the hands you play, not the guarantees and entry counts in the lobby, so they cannot tell you a $10,000 guarantee two clicks away has only drawn $7,000 in buy-ins.
SharkScope and The Hendon Mob answer "how tough is this field" and "what has this player done before." That is real tournament-selection value, and it pairs well with overlay hunting. It just is not the same signal. A soft field with no overlay is still a fair-priced game, and a tough field with a large overlay can be the better spot. Neither tool computes the live overlay.
PokerScout tracks player counts and traffic by network. That context can hint at which sites are running thin relative to their guarantees, which is loosely correlated with overlay. It does not give you the per-tournament number, the site, or the countdown you need to actually register into a specific overlaying event.
Poker Discords, 2+2 threads and the occasional shared spreadsheet are genuinely useful, and some grinders swap good overlay tips there. The limits are structural. Coverage depends on who happens to be watching, the data is as fresh as the last person to post, and these volunteer projects appear and disappear. It is a supplement, not a system.
This is the category that matches the rubric above, and it is where Profitmaxxer sits. It scans the tournament lobbies of 12 poker networks every 30 seconds, around the clock, and the moment a guaranteed prize pool exceeds the buy-ins collected it sends a Telegram alert with the overlay amount and the added expected value per entry. It flags tournaments approaching maximum late registration for the same reason, and lets you filter by site, buy-in range and minimum overlay percentage so the feed stays limited to spots that fit your bankroll. The covered networks are GGPoker, PokerStars, PokerStars.es, Americas Cardroom, 888poker, WPT Global, iPoker, CoinPoker, TigerGaming, SwC Poker, Stake Poker and QQPK.
You do not need software to check a single tournament. You need three numbers: the guarantee, the prize-pool portion of the buy-in, and the current number of entries.
Break-even entries = guarantee divided by the prize-pool portion of the buy-in.
A $22 tournament is usually $20 of prize money plus a $2 fee. A $10,000 guarantee at $20 per entry needs 500 entries to fund itself. If registration is sitting at 350 with minutes left, the field has paid $7,000 into a $10,000 pool, and the $3,000 gap is the overlay. Every entrant is sharing in $3,000 of money nobody at the table paid for.
Try it on your own lobby with the free overlay calculator, or read the full method in how to find poker tournament overlays. The math is simple. Doing it across every tournament on every site every 30 seconds is what is not.
If you are comparing options, judge them against the rubric, not the marketing:
It depends on how much of the field you want to cover. For a single tournament, the guarantee-versus-entries math above is enough. For catching overlays across every site you play without watching the lobbies yourself, the job needs real-time scanning with alerts, which is the category Profitmaxxer was built for. General trackers, results databases and traffic sites are strong for their own purposes but were not designed to detect live overlay.
Yes. Automated scanning reads the public lobby data from many networks continuously and flags the tournaments whose guarantee exceeds the buy-ins collected. Profitmaxxer does this across 12 networks every 30 seconds and pushes each overlay to Telegram with the dollar amount and the per-entry edge, so you can register before the window closes.
Reading publicly available lobby data such as APIs and XML feeds is an information activity, not gameplay. Profitmaxxer never plays hands, never injects into a poker client, and does not touch the games themselves. It reads the same lobby you can read, only everywhere at once, every 30 seconds.
Any overlay is positive expected value for the field, but the ones worth chasing clear your fees and then some. A useful filter is a minimum overlay as a percentage of the guarantee, so a small overlay on a large guarantee still surfaces while trivial ones stay quiet. That threshold is yours to set based on stakes and how selective you want to be.
Overlay figures and network coverage referenced here reflect Profitmaxxer's live scanning of 12 poker networks. Current totals are on the live stats page.
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