An overlay happens when a tournament's guaranteed prize pool is bigger than the money actually collected from buy-ins. The site has to cover the difference out of its own pocket, which means every entrant is playing for more than they paid for. A $50K guarantee that only collects $38K in buy-ins has a $12K overlay sitting on the table, split among whoever shows up.
Overlays are common in the exact spots you'd expect: new tournament series testing an ambitious guarantee, off-peak time slots, and satellites that guarantee more seats than the field ends up needing. If you want the full mechanics of where overlays come from and how to spot one manually, the step by step overlay guide breaks down the math field by field.
The numbers below come from live scanning data, not estimates. Profitmaxxer checks lobby data across 12 poker networks every 30 seconds and logs guarantee versus collected buy-ins at registration close, so these are recorded overlays, not projections.
These are the three largest individual overlays caught to date. All three landed on Americas Cardroom's OSSXL series, where big guarantees on high roller structures outran the field more than once.
| Tournament | Site | Overlay |
|---|---|---|
| OSSXL #390 Super High Roller, $500K GTD | Americas Cardroom | $52,500 |
| OSSXL #260H, $300K GTD | Americas Cardroom | $39,000 |
| OSSXL #394H Super High Roller, $200K GTD | Americas Cardroom | $30,000 |
Note the pattern: all three are high roller or super high roller structures inside a guarantee series. Big buy-ins mean a smaller pool of players capable of filling the field, so when the guarantee is set aggressively, the shortfall shows up in dollar terms fast. A $52,500 overlay on a super high roller isn't a huge percentage gap, but it's a huge dollar gap, split among far fewer entrants than a mid-stakes multi-table event.
Not every network produces overlays the same way. Across the current dataset, 888poker leads on raw instance count with over 28,000 recorded overlay occurrences, followed by GGPoker and WPT Global in the mid teens of thousands. Americas Cardroom shows far fewer instances by comparison, but produces the largest dollar amounts per hit, which is exactly what the table above shows.
| Network | Overlay Instances | Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| 888poker | 28,700+ | High frequency, smaller average size |
| GGPoker | 15,300+ | High frequency, mid-size |
| WPT Global | 15,000+ | High frequency, mid-size |
| Americas Cardroom | ~4,000 | Low frequency, largest single hits |
If your goal is catching lots of small overlays, high-frequency networks are where the volume lives. If you're chasing the rare five-figure hit, high roller series on Americas Cardroom is where the data points.
The overlays above didn't happen on stable, long-running weeklies. They happened inside a special guarantee series (OSSXL), where the site sets an aggressive number to market the event before it knows what the field will actually look like. That's the general rule: newer or promotional series with big marketed guarantees carry more overlay risk (in the player's favor) than the same site's regular Sunday schedule, because the guarantee gets locked in before demand is proven.
Satellites deserve their own mention because they stack two advantages on top of each other. First, satellites frequently overlay when a site guarantees more seats than the field fills, turning a $16.50 satellite into a ticket worth far more than the entry. Second, GTO Wizard's ICM research on late registration found that in a flat-payout satellite structure, a late entrant's seat carries roughly 29.76% more equity than the buy-in paid, purely from ICM seat equity, before a single hand is played. That's nearly three times the equity bump you get in a standard top-heavy MTT, where the same research puts the figure closer to 10.9%. Source: GTO Wizard, The ICM Benefits of Late Registration.
Combine an overlaid satellite with the seat equity bump from registering late into it, and the math compounds. For a full breakdown of how to actually play satellites for that edge rather than just entering them, see How to Win Poker Satellites Consistently.
Finding an overlay is only half the equation. When you register into it matters too, and it depends heavily on format.
In a standard MTT, GTO Wizard's ICM analysis shows a late entrant's seat is worth about 10.9% more than the buy-in in seat equity terms, because you've skipped the early stretch where short stacks bust and equity gets redistributed among survivors. That's ICM seat equity, not ROI, but it's a real, measurable edge that stacks on top of any overlay you've found. The full format-by-format math, including where this holds and where it doesn't, is in Is Late Registration Worth It in Poker?.
Progressive knockout tournaments flip this logic. GTO Wizard's separate analysis on PKO late registration found that once late reg closes with roughly a third of the field remaining, a starting stack has already lost about 14% of its value, because bounties get removed from the pool with every knockout that happens before you sit down. Source: GTO Wizard, The Hidden Cost of Late Reg in PKOs. If a PKO is running an overlay, the move is to register before the tournament starts, not to wait for a late reg window the way you would in a standard MTT or a mystery bounty.
The three overlays in the table above were all found the same way: continuous lobby scanning that compares each tournament's guarantee to its live buy-in count and flags the gap the moment it appears. Doing that manually across even a handful of sites means refreshing lobbies by hand across every guarantee event running that day, which is exactly the workflow this data comes from automating.
Profitmaxxer scans 12 poker networks every 30 seconds and sends two kinds of alerts: overlay alerts when a guarantee is running short of buy-ins, and Max Late Reg alerts that tell you exactly how many minutes are left before registration closes on a tournament worth entering. For PKOs specifically, the alert timing flips to pre-registration, in line with the ICM cost late reg carries in that format.
The overlays that make a list like this one are rare by design, five figures on a single tournament doesn't happen every day. But the underlying mechanic, guarantee outrunning buy-ins, happens constantly at smaller dollar amounts across every network running a guarantee schedule. Catching those consistently is a scanning problem, not a lobby-refreshing problem, and it compounds the same way the ICM seat equity numbers above do: small, real edges, stacked every session.
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