BetMGM Poker PA is offering some serious value to players right now. The Pennsylvania online poker site is in its infancy and is still building its profile in the Keystone State. As a result, many tournaments on the site are currently missing their guarantees.
The most significant of these is the Daily 10K GTD NLH tournament. The $109 contest is regularly falling 20-30% short of its guaranteed prize pool. To put it another way, that’s up to $3000 of overlay of a $10,000 prize pool.
The poker site —which shares a player pool with sister site Borgata PA—has consistently fallen short of the 100 players required for its flagship daily tournament, meaning that BetMGM has had to stump up the cash itself.
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Some of the Best Value Tournaments Available in PA
This is obviously great news for players. Not only does this mean a significant percentage of the prize pool is essentially free money , but also that players have to battle through a much smaller field to get their hands on it.
The Daily $10k is by no means the only tournament to see overlays. Several other events undershoot their projected capacity by a wide margin. The daily $1k Turbo has seen as little as $288 coming from tournament buy-ins, leaving the operator to make up the remaining $712—over 70% of the total prize pool.
Satellites haven’t been immune either. Qualifiers for the Sunday $40k—BetMGM PA’s largest regular tournament—ended up offering several extra tickets, giving players a great chance to qualify cheaply for the marquee event.
Even on Sundays—traditionally the busiest day for online poker—tournaments have struggled to reach their quotas. Last weekend, the $10k Daily, the $55 PKO, the $2500 GTD 40-Stack, and the Daily $1k Turbo all had overlays.
There could be several reasons for the shortfalls: the site could just be taking some time to build up to its full potential. The guarantees might have been set deliberately high as an inducement for players to sign up.
Launching in the final week of rival PokerStars PA's PASCOOP 2021 won’t have helped either. The series turned out to be the second-largest ever in the state post-regulation, so Pennsylvanian players could be forgiven for having other things on their minds.
Time is of the Essence
Of course, it could just be that BetMGM has been over-optimistic with the size of its guarantees. Whatever the reason, these high-value spots are unlikely to be around for long.
As word of the overlays spreads, players will be attracted to the site. And that, ironically, will close the very loophole they are seeking to exploit. But if that doesn’t happen, BetMGM will surely have to lower their guarantees. After all, giving away $2000-3000 every day is hardly a sustainable business model.
So, players wishing to make the most of the extra prize money on offer, will need to get in quick. Indeed, numbers already appear to be on the increase—there were only 70 runners for the first edition of the tournament on April 29 but just eight days later, on Friday May 7, that figure had crept up to 80.
It will be worth keeping an eye on the situation. BetMGM PA is lining up its inaugural Online Series, likely to take place later this month. Players will certainly want to take advantage of any overlays that may be on offer then.
