An overlay happens when a tournament's guaranteed prize pool is larger than the buy-ins collected. If a site guarantees $100,000 and the field only pays in $85,000, the site adds the missing $15,000. Every player in the field is effectively playing for money that nobody paid in.
For a tournament grinder, overlay is a direct edge. The prize pool you are playing for is bigger than the sum of the entries, so each entry is worth more than its buy-in before skill is even considered.
CoinPoker is a crypto-first poker network. You deposit and withdraw in crypto, and its cashier supports BTC, ETH, USDC, SOL, POL, BNB, TRX and USDT, according to PokerStrategy's review and payment guides. That audience is smaller than the fields on the largest fiat sites, and guarantees are often set aggressively, particularly in series. That combination is where overlay comes from.
Three things push CoinPoker guarantees past what the field pays in.
CoinPoker has been running very large guaranteed events in 2026. According to SoMuchPoker and PokerWired, the Global Online Poker Championship ran from August 23 to September 28 with a $50,000,000 guarantee and more than 700 medal events. Sportscasting reported that the World Poker Masters in May carried $25,000,000 in guarantees. The One is scheduled for October with a $5,000,000 guarantee and $1,000,000 to first place from a $250 buy-in.
The larger the guarantee, the more entries it takes to cover it. Some events fill and some do not, and you cannot tell which from the schedule alone.
Fewer players means less liquidity. When a guarantee is set for a busy night and the night is quiet, the field falls short. Off-peak hours and mid-week events are where this shows up most.
Overlay is not fixed at the start. A tournament can look short at the first hand and then fill during late reg, or look healthy and fall short as the registration window closes. The number you care about is the overlay at the moment you register, not the one in the lobby an hour earlier.
Profitmaxxer's public stats page reports live numbers. At the time of writing it showed $56,668,931 in tournament overlay detected across 85,394 instances over 204 days, scanning 12 poker networks every 30 seconds. That works out to roughly $664 per instance across all networks, and the page lists a daily average of $277,788.
For CoinPoker specifically, the page showed 5,204 overlay instances, which ranks fifth among the sites tracked. Over 204 days that is about 25 overlay instances a day on average. These totals refresh daily, so check the page for current figures.
Two cautions on reading those numbers. First, an instance is one tournament detected with overlay, and a single tournament can be counted at different moments as the field changes. Second, the average across all networks is not the average for CoinPoker, so do not assume a typical CoinPoker overlay equals $664.
| Factor | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Guarantee size | Larger guarantees need more entries to cover |
| Time of day | Quiet hours leave more events short |
| Series vs daily | Series events often carry bigger guarantees |
| Late reg window | Overlay can grow or shrink until reg closes |
Late registration is already valuable on its own. GTO Wizard's ICM analysis of late registration found that a late entrant's seat is worth about 10.9% more than the buy-in in a standard MTT, and about 29.76% more in a flat-paying satellite. These figures are ICM seat equity, not ROI. They measure what the seat is worth in prize-pool terms, not what you will win on average.
Now stack overlay on top. If the tournament is also short of its guarantee, the prize pool per remaining player is larger still. A late entrant into an overlaid event gets both effects: a shorter path to the money and extra added cash in the pool.
There is one important exception. In progressive knockout tournaments the picture reverses. GTO Wizard's study on PKOs found that a late starting stack loses about 14% of its value, because bounties on early eliminations are already gone. For PKOs, the better play is usually to register before the start rather than late. If you want the broader timing picture, see our data-backed guide to the best time to late register.
Open the lobby and compare the guarantee to entries times buy-in. If entries times buy-in is already near or above the guarantee, there is no overlay to chase. Remember to account for rake: the prize pool comes from the buy-in portion, not the full cost of entry.
Look at how many entries came in over the previous registration period and how long late reg stays open. A tournament with a long late-reg window and steady inflow may close the gap. One with a short window and slow inflow probably will not.
Skip PKO late reg unless the overlay is large enough to outweigh the 14% stack-value penalty. Standard freezeouts, satellites and mystery bounties are the cleaner targets. Satellites in particular can carry overlay that is easy to miss, which we cover for another site in our 888poker satellite overlay guide.
This is where most players lose the value. You see the spot, intend to register, get pulled into another table, and the window closes. Multi-tabling makes it worse.
Overlay improves the value of an entry but does not remove variance. Keep buy-ins inside your bankroll rules, which our bankroll guide by format covers.
Checking lobbies by hand across several sites is slow, and CoinPoker is only one of them. Profitmaxxer scans 12 poker networks: GGPoker, Americas Cardroom, PokerStars, PokerStars.es, 888poker, WPT Global, iPoker Network, CoinPoker, TigerGaming, SwC Poker, QQPK and Stake Poker. The scan runs every 30 seconds and sends alerts to Telegram.
Two alert types matter for this article:
You can filter by buy-in range, minimum overlay percentage, speed, currency and whether to include satellites. PKOs are handled separately with pre-registration alerts that arrive before the tournament starts, in line with the stack-value loss described above.
The offer is $49 a month with a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee, and the player count is capped at 50. If you want to compare approaches first, our roundup of tools for finding poker overlays covers the options.
No. Most events cover their guarantee. Overlay shows up in a subset, which is why scanning on a 30-second cycle matters more than checking the lobby once.
No. Overlay raises the value of each entry, but you still play the tournament. Results vary by skill, field and variance.
Not necessarily. For a look at the largest ones recorded, see our biggest poker tournament overlays breakdown.
CoinPoker overlay tournaments exist because large guarantees meet a smaller crypto-poker player pool. The edge is real but time-sensitive, because overlay moves until registration closes. Compare guarantee to entries, favour formats where late reg helps, avoid late PKO entries, and act before the window shuts. Live scan figures, including CoinPoker's instance count, are on the Profitmaxxer stats page.
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