When a poker site runs a Guaranteed Tournament, the money in that guaranteed prize pool is typically expected to come from the buy-ins of the players entering the competition. But when not enough entrants sign up for a tournament, the poker site doesn’t have enough buy-in money to cover the entire guaranteed prize pool amount, and so has to fork up the difference from their own coffers. This is called an “overlay”, and it’s what Full Tilt Poker had to face multiple times during its FTOPS XII.

The Full Tilt Online Poker Series 12 has just ended and the players, of course, are happy as ever. The FullTilt Poker operators? Not so much. Just look at the main event, for one…

The FTOPS XII main event had a scant 4,581 players paying the $500 + $35, bringing the prize pool to about $2.3 million. Only problem is, the guarantee was $2.5 million, so Full Tilt had to cover the remaining $200,000 from their “profits”. With only $160,000 raked in from the $35 entry fees, Full Tilt took an over $40,000 loss on this event.