The GGMasters is coming up on its 2 year anniversary. In order to best leverage the event for publicity purposes, GGPoker is laying on an enormous "Overlay Edition" of the event. This will be a single tourney kicking off on March 20, 2022.
The GGMasters Overlay Edition is so-called because it is calculated to produce just that. The buy-in is just $150, while the guarantee is $5,000,000. There will be no rebuys, meaning that GGPoker would need 33,334 people, bots, or duplicate accounts to enter the event in order to break even.
Day one will see three flights which will be staggered to facilitate players in different time zones. These flights will kick off on March 20, at:
- 12:00 UTC, for Flight 1 (Asia);
- 17:00 UTC, for Flight 2 (Europe); and
- 22:00 UTC, for Flight 3 (Americas).
All three starting flights will play the same number of levels on Day 1. On Day 2 (March 21, 2022), the survivors from all three flights will recombine at 17:00 UTC and play down to a winner.
Daniel Negreanu, shot a short promo video for GGPoker which he tweeted with the caption: "I can't believe what @GGPoker is doing!!! Make sure you don't miss out on this one."
GGMasters Overlay Edition
With a guarantee of $5 million, a buy-in of $150, and a strict zero re-entry policy, GGPoker won't see a profit unless 33,334 individual players pony up.
“$150 buy-in. $5,000,000 guaranteed. No rebuys," Daniel Negreanu said on the GGPoker blog. "There’s no way this tournament is not going to have an overlay! This is GGPoker’s flagship freezeout tournament and you won’t want to miss out on the value this March 20.”
Hitting more than 33k players is a difficult ask. The biggest tournament field in history was 225k players on PokerStars in 2013. However, that tourney had a $1 buy-in and took place just after PokerStars had subsumed its biggest competitor, FullTilt, in the choppy wake of Black Friday.
Then again, hitting the guarantee is not the point. This is the Overlay Edition after all.
GGPoker are putting this guarantee out there explicitly expecting to whiff. What the players read as free money, is really coming out of GGPoker's marketing budget.
New accounts set up for this event will have some non-zero conversion rate to regular players on the GG Network.
If it brings in enough new business, this short-term sacrifice should prove itself a smart gambit easily in the long term. Poker players love an overlay, and this is a pretty spectacular way to guarantee one.
Featured image source: GGPoker
