Followers may remember a thread from last week where we looked at the results of Week 1 of Stadium Series:

"Do I think there will be some massive value opportunities here across all three networks for players over the next two months? Absolutely." https://twitter.com/pokerprojones/status/1283006308678021121

Well, that has come to pass.

We have seen overlays in first 2.5 weeks of PS Stadium Series and first week partypoker WPT World Online Championships like we've never seen before.

There is so much value for players right now. https://pokerindustrypro.com/news/article/211569-pokerstars-stadium-series-partypokers-wpt-series-have

First, Stadium Series. So as noted before, Week 1 had $130,000 in overlays, which is quite a lot for the first week of a series, but the operator brought in $700k in rake so made a tidy profit.

Week 2 - that's not the case. Almost ** $1 million ** in overlays in 24 tournaments.

[As always, data is copyright @pokerindpro tracked through hard manual work by myself and @anuj2212 (mostly anuj) so if you use it, please credit!]

The operator collected $750k in rake, so that's a net loss of about $200K.

That's basically unheard of at PokerStars.

- All but one high-tier event missed.
- Final mid tier missed by 25% / $370K
- Final high missed by 10% / $150K

Week 3 no respite. Of the 12 events so far, 10 have missed for a total of ~$300K in overlay.

Now, as always with these things there are caveats - we don't know:

- How much was made in sat rake
- Or indeed, guaranteed sat overlays
- Or how much was promotional spend

etc.

However, as it stands right now, as per our calculations, PokerStars is still *just* in profit in this rudimentary "rake minus overlays" calculation. Just.

Week 1:+$450k
Week 2: +-$200K
Week 3: ~ break even

For a net of +$250K so far.

However, big events of wk3 to come.

As stated, this is pretty much unheard of. $1.4 million in overlays in 2.5 weeks at PokerStars (while still taking in $1.8 million in rake) has never been seen before.

Now, as pointed out in the thread last week, this doesn't have to be a bad thing. Running MTTs with overlay...

... has been a common strategy for operators in the past. It just hasn't been the *PokerStars* strategy. Maybe they planned on breaking even on this series, feeling like they had to do something big to go against WPT/WSOP series.

But to me it feels like they misjudged.

Mostly, because I'm not seeing any operators shouting about these overlays from the rooftops, which is what you'd think an operator would do if they wanted to promote all this value.

Or giving out loads of ticket value in loyalty chests, freerolls etc.

If you're going to overlay by six figures, may as well put a bunch of tickets in players hands ahead of time, right?

Which leads us on to the partypoker WPT World Online Championships which if anything has gotten off to an even rockier start.

29 Events so far. 23 overlays. Look at this sea of red (oranges are just covered; whites are comfortably covered)

Honestly though, this probably needs graduations of red in here to really highlight what's going on. Because many of these are close misses (< -10%), others are WHOPPERS.

$11 WPT Open Micro - $100K guarantee, needed 10,000 entries, got 4475 - not even *half* what was needed.

In fact, some of these numbers are so out-there we had to check 3 or 4 times. But we are pretty sure we have it right. Many others 20% to 50% missed.

Scan down the second to last column to spot where that value is. Micros in particular, these is so much $$ for grabs here.

Partypoker covered $500k in overlays in this first week.
Profit of $240K.
Net loss: $260K.

Ouch.

PokerStars is entering into their final week next week, which they can only be happy about. But there's some huge tournaments on that schedule - including this set of Grand Finals:

Low $55 - $1MM gtd
$530 Mid - $2MM gtd
$5200 High - $5MM gtd

These are looking like some really tall targets right now, especially that High tier, which needs 1000 entries to cover. Almost all the high tiers have been missing so far.

Party, on the other hand, is staring down the barrel of 6 more weeks of this.

Why is this happening?

I've tweeted a lot before about interest in online poker dwindling over the last few months. The dot-com market is up maybe 20% year-over-year right now, but it has given up at least >80% of the gains enjoyed during the April/May peak.

July/August is the quietest period of the year. *No one* runs tournament series in this time.

Instead, what we are seeing is 3 of the largest poker tournaments series ever held. All overlapping. After a ~$1 billion spring.

Operators of course knew all of this.

Either they expected to be able cause a second wave of interest with the massive branding + big Twitch streaming strat, and reconnect with new players who joined during April; or they are happy to take some hits here in a bit to build a lot term player base.

Another possibility is operators misjudged how much wallet would be pulled over to GGPoker for the WSOP online bracelet events.

Either way, if you are a winning MTT player and you haven't basically taken off the next few weeks to grind, you are missing out on one of the biggest giveaways (in terms of overlay value) the industry has ever committed to.

Touching on the GGPoker WSOP 2020 Online Series briefly - this has not yet suffered the same fate.

Most of their bracelet events do not have guarantees, so the direct exposure is minimized.

The one guarantee easily covered is $2 million, with 29,000 runners building a $2.7 million prize pool.

Of course as we all know, that was a victim of its own success - you can read more on that in this thread, if you missed it https://twitter.com/pokerprojones/status/1285217793303097346

Those without guarantees have pulled in 7 figure prize pools. One even went to $2 million. The phases for this weekend big events seem to be doing pretty well.

The big test will be Sunday for sure, both from a technical and turnout perspective. We'll circle back next week.