An overlay happens when a tournament's guaranteed prize pool is larger than the buy-ins collected. If a tournament guarantees $5,000 but only $4,000 in entries has been paid, the operator adds the $1,000 difference. Every player in the field shares that bonus, so each entry is worth more than its price.
TigerGaming is a good place to look for this because of how its tournament schedule is built. It runs on the Chico Poker Network, and the room shares its player pool and tournament schedule with sister brands on the same software. Guarantees are set against the combined network, not against TigerGaming alone. Third-party reviews note that the guarantees are smaller than the biggest series on other US-facing networks, with buy-ins ranging from about $1 to several hundred dollars and the largest weekly guarantees on Sunday.
Smaller guarantees matter for overlay hunters in one specific way. A $2,000 guarantee that is 85% funded with an hour of late registration left is a very different proposition from a $200,000 event in the same state. The overlay is modest in dollars, but it can be large relative to your buy-in, and that is what drives your edge.
Three structural features show up on a lot of mid-stakes schedules, TigerGaming included:
None of that guarantees an overlay in any specific tournament. It tells you where to point your attention, which is the real problem for anyone multi-tabling.
You can check the numbers yourself in the lobby. The process is short:
If the collected pool is already above the guarantee, there is no overlay. If it is below, the gap divided by the number of entries is the extra value per seat, before any further late entries shrink it.
| Situation | What it means | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Pool well below guarantee, registration closing soon | Overlay likely to persist | Strong candidate to register |
| Pool well below guarantee, hours of late reg left | Overlay may shrink as entries arrive | Watch it, register nearer the close |
| Pool at or above guarantee | No overlay | Judge it on skill edge and ICM only |
| PKO format, pool below guarantee | Overlay exists but late stack is weak | Consider registering before the start |
Overlay is only one of two edges. The other is the late registration decision itself.
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 are ICM seat equity gains, not ROI figures. They come from the fact that a late entrant gets a full starting stack while some of the field has already been eliminated, so the stack is worth more in prize-pool terms than the price paid. You can read the full analysis at GTO Wizard's ICM benefits of late registration.
Put that together with an overlay and the two effects stack. A late seat in a standard MTT with a funded shortfall carries the seat equity gain and the added prize money.
For the timing mechanics, our guide to the best time to late register poker tournaments covers when to enter and how blind levels change what a starting stack is worth.
Progressive knockout tournaments reverse the logic. GTO Wizard's analysis of PKOs found that a late starting stack loses about 14% of its value, because bounties already on the table have been collected by other players while you miss them. The study is here: the hidden cost of late reg in PKOs.
So a TigerGaming PKO with an overlay is an event to register for before it starts, not during late registration. You collect the overlay and keep the full bounty structure from the first hand.
Everything above is easy for one tournament. The trouble is volume. A schedule has dozens of events running at once, each with its own guarantee, registration clock and format. If you are already playing several tables, you will see a lobby for a few seconds at a time. By the time you return, the window may have closed.
That is the gap automation fills. For a broader comparison of the options, see best tools for finding poker overlays.
Profitmaxxer scans 12 poker networks every 30 seconds: GGPoker, Americas Cardroom, PokerStars, PokerStars.es, 888poker, WPT Global, iPoker Network, CoinPoker, TigerGaming, SwC Poker, QQPK and Stake Poker. TigerGaming is one of them.
For TigerGaming specifically, you get two kinds of alert delivered to Telegram:
You can filter by buy-in range, minimum overlay percentage, speed and currency. For PKOs, a pre-registration setting alerts you a set number of minutes before the start, which lines up with the 14% finding above.
On scale, the scanner has found $57.2M in total overlay across all 12 networks in 206 days, an average of about $277K per day over 86,245 overlay instances. Those are network-wide totals as of October 2026, not TigerGaming figures. We do not publish a TigerGaming-only total here because the mix of games, buy-ins and hours changes what any one player will see. What you will see depends on your filters, your hours and your buy-in range.
Profitmaxxer is $49 per month, locked in for life while you stay subscribed. There is a 7-day free trial with full access and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Membership is capped at 30 paying members, and after that new sign-ups join a waitlist.
If you play across several rooms, these guides cover the same approach elsewhere: Americas Cardroom overlay tournaments and the biggest poker tournament overlays for the real numbers behind the largest cases.
TigerGaming overlay tournaments reward players who check guarantees against collected pools and time their entry. In standard events and satellites, late registration is worth more in ICM terms. In PKOs, register early. The hard part is watching everything at once, and that is the part a 30-second scanner handles.
Max Late Reg alerts you when it is time to register for profitable tournaments. Set your preferences once, get pinged when the math says go.
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