This Could Be One Of The Biggest Overlays In Online Poker History

Around lunchtime on Monday, a poker site is going to hand a million dollars to one person. A sizable chunk of that money is money nobody ever paid in.

The tournament is called The One. It has been running on CoinPoker since October 4, the buy-in is $250, and the prize pool is guaranteed at $5 million no matter how many people show up. First place takes $1 million of it.

To actually collect $5 million at $250 a head, CoinPoker needs 20,000 entries. As of Friday it had a little over 10,000, with a handful of starting flights left.

The $5 million gets paid either way, and the difference comes out of the poker site's pocket.

In poker, that gap has a name. It is called an overlay, and it is one of the rarer things to see in the game: a pot bigger than the money put into it. Everyone still in the tournament is getting a mathematically better deal than the one they signed up for, and the extra is simply distributed to whoever happens to be sitting there when the chips are counted.

Online poker's record overlay belongs to GGPoker. In February 2026 its GGMasters sixth-anniversary event guaranteed $10 million, drew 59,480 entries at $150 a time and finished $1,791,760 short. That beat a $1.4 million shortfall set by India's PokerBaazi in 2024, which had itself beaten PokerStars' Big Blowout from December 2020.

If the field finishes under roughly 12,800 entries, CoinPoker's shortfall passes GGPoker's and the record is gone. At 16,000 entries it is covering $1 million. The exact figure will not be known until Monday morning's last two flights are done, but on current pace this is a seven-figure hole.

Sites take this risk deliberately, as a large guarantee is an advertisement. It gets written about, it pulls players in, and if the field falls short the shortfall is just what the campaign cost. CoinPoker is a newer operator trying to buy its way into a conversation that GGPoker and PokerStars have owned for years, and a seven-figure miss is exactly the sort of number that gets a tournament covered.

CoinPoker built a qualifying ladder into The One that starts at zero. Freerolls, free to enter, feeding step satellites from twenty cents, feeding direct satellites at $1, $12.50, $25 and $50, feeding the $250 starting flights. Two players going by fishbrosTV and Tiniesta1994 came through the $1 route and now hold more than two million chips each, among the bigger stacks of the thousand-plus who made Day 2.

There are professionals in there as well. Patrick Leonard has 59 big blinds. Rayan "Beriuzy" Chamas has 112. The average survivor sits on about 36, which in practice means most of Monday will be people shoving their stack in and hoping to spin it up into the top prize.

CoinPoker is not a licensed US poker operator. It runs on an offshore license from the Autonomous Island of Anjouan in the Comoros, it is regulated by no US state gaming authority, and the games are denominated in the stablecoin USDT rather than dollars. It accepts American players from outside the regulated market, which means none of the protections attached to a New Jersey or Michigan license are in play. This is all worth knowing if you are in the poker space.

Day 2 starts at 17:30 UTC on Monday, which is lunchtime on the east coast. Somebody is winning a million dollars, and a meaningful share of it will have come out of the house's own coffers.