Hi all,

Some time ago I “discovered” overlays and wanted to play more of those. One thing led to another (too much free time …) and the result is this piece of software.
An overlay, for those who don’t know, is money the poker site adds to the prize pool – a net gain for the players.
Usually, this happens in guaranteed prize tournaments when there aren’t enough players to cover the prize pool.
Playing an overlay tournament has a better ROI than a regular tournament. You can read more in www.OverlayZone.com/FAQ

While there are many guaranteed prize tournaments throughout the day, only a handful actually have an overlay.

The Overlay Notifier (free; download at www.OverlayZone.com) is an application that sits on the task bar (near the clock) and alerts you when a tournament has an overlay, shortly before it starts.


If you click the balloon you see the tournament list.


Double clicking a tournament in the list will fire up the tournament lobby (or main lobby – depending on the poker client).

That’s pretty much it. Play your game and enjoy an improved ROI.

I’ve tried to iron out all the bugs possible, but no doubt there are more. Please let me know if you have any problem, or request.

I am now working on an “overlay report” which will summarize previous (weekly/monthly ...) overlays and allow you to see what tournament carried what overlay, etc. I’ll post here when it’s ready.

CA

You should turn on anti aliasing (ClearType) on your PC, everything will look much nicer!

This is quality

Can you open-source the client please? It contains no special code that nobody may see, and that way we can be sure (by compiling it by ourselves) that it is secure.

Re anti aliasing, I'll grab screen captures with ClearType and update the images.

Re source code, my intention down the road, if people do use it, is to charge poker sites for referrals (affiliate). If I open source it, I'll lose that opportunity.
I welcome other ideas if you have to re-assure you.

If there is a program that can monitor an application's communication you can see that the only thing the program sends is the text "Nothing" once a minute. It does so to verify that the communication link is not broken.

A few bugs fixed. One important bug was that in some regions (e.g. Ireland, and other) events were not showing up. They now do.
If anything is not working well for you, please do let me know.
Reminder - the program self updates at midnight, or go to "Help->Check for updates" for immediate update.
_ca_

The Overlay Report is now working at the Overlay Zone site.
You can get the summary on the front page and detailed analysis on the Overlay Report page.

Last weeks' stats (4 poker sites):
$153K in overlays. $32K largest (Ultimate Bet).
On average, Pacific Poker had 39% of overlay.
Full Tilt's largest overlay was 104%.
Stars had 75 tournaments with Overlay.

85% of Overlay Zone's alerts ended with an actual overlay (excluding Full Tilt - see comment on the web site).

Enjoy
CA

Problem with the software.

I install it, it works fine, but when i shut down my computer, it wont shut down overlay notifier.

I have to press contrtol alt delete, then select overlay notifier, then close that b4 shutting down.

Any ideas what could be going wrong?

I noticed it as well and will resolve it.

Version 1.1.0.104 is now posted. Your application will self update.

Changes:
1. Reboot/shut-down bug solved.
2. Log write permission bug solved ("File access").
3. Bug with double clicking tournaments solved.
4. I also changed the way the filter works.
The filter now decides whether a tournament enters the list or not. Once on the list, tournaments remain on the list until registration ends or the overlay is 0%.

I appreciate the bug reports. Keep them coming as well as feature requests.
CA

Thx! I'll have to try this out.

Another problem.

I want to set the settings to 10 min, and 20%

Everytime i change them, they just reset to 3min and the default %

This is actually intentional.
I only track tournaments that are about to start within 3 minutes.
If you were to get alerts 10 minutes in advance with a 20% overlay, practically every guaranteed prize tournament will qualify. Even with 100% overlay I think all tournaments qualify.
Most sign ups to tournaments happen in the last 2 minutes.

You can also check out the filter evaluation page to see how accurate a filter setting is.

Perhaps I can add these tournaments and limit alerts.
Why do you want alerts 10 minutes in advance?

3 minutes is not enough time to start my software, open access manager, log in, find the tourney and register, especially when multitabling and being busy.

Even 5 minutes would make a lot of difference

OK. I'll extend it to 5. It may take me a couple of days.

As for opening the tournament, if you use PStars or FullTilt the following applies:
If you double click a tournament in the OverlayZone client:
1. If the stars or full tilt client is not running, OverlayZone will launch it.
2. If the client is running, OverlayZone will open the tournament lobby for you.

For UltimateBet and 888 it only launches the poker client.

Thank you for the feedback!