Over $1m in Overlay at WPT Global’s Summer Festival

The $220 ($200+$20) Main Event had a $500,000 guarantee, requiring 2,500 entrants to avoid an overlay. There were 30 starting flights for this event and with four flights remaining, the tournament was still short by over 700 entries. 

The final two flights has turbo and hyper structures respectively and although they both posted much higher participation numbers than the previous 28 flights, it was still not enough to get the event over the line. The final number of entries was 2,252, which meant that the guarantee was missed by $49,600

The added value equated to an extra $22 being added to the prize pool for each entry made, meaning that the fees from the event were not enough to cover the overlay.

WPT Global Ambassador Patrick “Egption” Tardiff had a great festival. He took second place in the $3,500 WPT Championship for $130,640. This was not his only score of the festival, as he also finished 3rd for $25,859 in the $220 Summer Festival Main Event on the same day.

The WPT Championship was won by "pas1161br" for $206,300. The event had a $1m prize pool guarantee and needed exactly 300 entries to avoid the online operator having to make up the difference from its own pocket. However it was also a bridge too far to be crossed for the site, which has an M.O  (modus operandi) of biting-off more than its liquidity base can chew for its headline events.

With just one of the eleven starting days to go there had been just over 200 entries in total and although 78 players joined the final flight, it still resulted in a missed guarantee of $54,780. 

Considering that they were still over $300k behind the target when this final flight began, Alex Scott and his team will surely be seeing this as a good result.

In fact, WPT Global CEO Alex Scott might not be upset at all about this and might even have been raising a celebratory glass of something bubbly at the result. In recent months he has frequently mentioned that it is in fact company poilicy to give tournament players value through missed guarantees.

PokerWired reached out to Alex for comment following the conclusion of the Summer Festival, asking him for his thoughts on it. He responded 

Readers can rest assured that this additional cost won’t bring the festivities to an end, as Scott went on to say 

On that basis players can fully expect there to be great value via more unrealistic-to-hit guarantees for WPT Global’s next online poker series, the Fall Festival.

The next tournament series on WPT Global is the Fall Festival, which is set to begin on September 8th and although the site has yet to reveal the full schedule and size of guarantees, they have already made a statement of ambition, that they will continue to grow these series with every edition. 

Given that the tournament schedule for the Summer Festival carried $8m in guarantees, we can expect the Fall Festival schedule to be even higher. $9 or $10m look like the frontrunners for the headline number, which is expected to be revealed soon.

As the site significantly failed to reach its targets, it seems likely that the next one might also struggle. Even without seeing the final schedule or having any knowledge of the size of the guarantees, PokerWired rates the Fall Festival at WPT Global as a grade A golden value egg, waiting to be hatched. If you have any magic beans, now would be a good time to invest some by opening an account with WPT Global.