Poker Perambulation

Breaking news: PartyGaming and 888 Holding are in merger talks. Both London listed stocks have been crushed by the UIGEA. A brief release said, “The board of 888 notes the recent press speculation and confirms that it has had various preliminary discussions with third parties following suspension of its US activities.

I talked about how some try to ‘get back’ at the sites by Bonus Whoring. For tournament players there is a nice way to get some advantage against the house. The idea is to look for tournaments with overlay. Overlay happens in Guarantee Tournaments without rebuys.

Let’s say the site has a 3000 Guarantee with a 5-1 buyin and 1000 open seats. At 600 the house covers the guarantee. But if only 400 register, the house has to make up the $1000 difference. The tournament has a 1K overlay.

An easy example of a tournament that always has overlay is a low-rent one on PokerRoom called the Lucky Dollar which costs $1.10 to play. It is a $1000 Guarantee. They offer three of them a day. It isn’t unusual to see a $500 overlay in one of them. And almost all carry some overlay. It is a nice practice tournament for the beginning player. It has a flat structure. (pays more places than most tournaments) The competition is slightly better than the freerolls; but not a lot. You’ll never get rich playing it. Nice practice and a decent overlay though.

Pokerworks has a listing in our site reviews. In the site reviews of many there is a chart showing how active they are through the day. Here is the one for PokerRoom:

You can see that it most active around 4PM EST. So you’d figure that the morning Lucky Dollar would have the best overlay.

You can use the Porkerworks site info to ‘Overlay Whore’ the sites you like to play. Go to the sites you use and, if they are one of those that charts the activity, you can make some quick notes on the lower traffic hours. These charts can surprise you. Lets say for talking sake that the sites you like to play at are PokerStars and Titan. Both have activity graphs.

PokerStars looks like this:

And here is Titan:

Titan peaks at around 4PM EST. As the Euros go to bed they are not replace by North American players. PokerStars on-the-other-hand picks up more North American traffic then and doesn’t start its decline until about 11PM. If you are in Europe, early morning tournaments on Stars are most likely to see an overlay in your morning period. For those in North America, Titan holds potential for overlay in late evening tournaments.

Active sites will have fewer tournaments with overlay. If you are home sick or have a day off, look at the early morning tournaments. I’ve hit some nice overlays on UltimateBet mornings. If you look through the selection of sites Pokerworks lists (almost all) you might find a few that provide you with a lucrative tournament every day of the week. It is easy to use the site list and do some prospecting. Browse the list. Look at the sites that are reported to have fewer players. Register using the button provided. You don’t have to decide to fund. You can delete the software if it did have the games we’re looking for after a few days of checking.

There aren’t many places in this world you can ‘Break it off in the Man!’ and poker rooms always seem to get their piece of the pie. Have some fun; do a bit of work. Get even for a change.

Addendum:

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. You can get the complete skinny from Wikipedia. You select a reader and the various feeds populate the reader for you to browse the items available without having to jump around in your browser. You can get news, music, podcasts, torrents, you-name-it. They all come together in one place. You can even select my stuff, or those of the rest of the gang here to view in your reader.

I use Firefox as my browser. It has plug-ins that provide various ways to view RSS feeds. I use one called NewsFox that operates in the traditional way with sites I want on the left and the articles shown at right top and the article selected in the lower left area. You’ve seen a similar formating setup in a number of programs. I also have another feed active in Firefox called infoRSS. It uses part of the bottom line that displays info about the page loaded normally. It uses the unused area to show items available from RSS sites just like the first one I mention. But rather than loading it special it checks the feeds periodically. It is a great way to get breaking news. There are others and if you use Firefox you can pick one here.

Addendum:

While Congress remains with its head in the sand or nether parts, the state are climbing on the gambling bandwagon–for good or evil as your conscience dictates. Pennsylvania has legalized slots and expects revenue of 3-billion annually and half of that will go to the state’s tax coffer. The most profitable riverboat in my home state is in the formerly sleepy Ohio River town of Lawrenceberg because Ohio has not had gambling. Ohio is adding gambling. States are sick of sending their residence’s disposable income to another state. The gambling cat is out of the bag!

And our Congress in their infinite wisdom created the Unlawful Gambling Enforcement act which will have to use millions of extra dollars added to their flagrantly deficit spending to enforce. WTG, Congress. The only thing leading edge about you guys is your rush to senility.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 6:09 am and is filed under Journal, Tournaments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.