Two six-figure tournament overlays over the weekend saw poker players getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in value at The Lodge in Austin, Texas and Borgata in Atlantic City.
The $3,000 buy-in Lodge Championship Series Main Event offered a $2 million guarantee but came up short for an overlay of $417,000. Meanwhile, the $2,700 buy-in Borgata Poker Open Championship (BPOC) fell short of its $2 million guarantee by about a quarter million.
California’s Michael Liang wound up winning The Lodge Championship for $428,000, while Florida’s Joel Deutsch shipped the BPOC for a career-best $347,000.
Doug Polk’s Texas Poker Plans Hit a Wall
“Scheduling Errors” and “Logistical Nightmares”
The Championship event at The Lodge, which ran May 8-14, offered seven starting flights with 40-minute levels on Day 1 and unlimited re-entry. On May 9, The Lodge announced it was projecting a $500,000 overlay for the event.
The next day, things hit a snag as the poker club learned that “a large portion of parking spots in front of Lodge Card Club are unavailable today.” To accommodate its inconvenienced patrons, The Lodge provided golf cart shuttles from various locations.
“We made some scheduling errors and dealt with some logistical nightmares,” Lodge co-owner Doug Polk wrote on X on May 12. “Tough week, but as always, we learn and get stronger. We will continue pushing Texas poker forward.”
In a later post, Polk said he believed the event could be a success but “we just need to make some changes.”
“If Choctaw can run one of these in the middle of no where we should be able to as well in Austin.”
Several poker players praised Polk and The Lodge for how they handled the situation and for honoring the guarantee, which doesn’t always happen.
“Thanks for honoring the guarantee, surprisingly not everyone in the industry does,” wrote high-stakes pro Adam Hendrix.
Last year’s Lodge Championship Series Main Event surpassed the $2 million guarantee with a prize pool of $2,134,000.
