The Coast Connection appears some Fridays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It’s an advertising supplement geared towards promoting Gold Coast, Orleans, Sam’s Town, and Suncoast casinos. Some weeks there are very valuable coupons, such as point multipliers, match play coupons, and food offers. Sometimes the coupons are sparse. But the R-J only costs 75¢. The value of the coupons averages far more than the 75¢ cost of the paper — assuming you play at one or more of these casinos and are willing to clip and use the coupons.
The back cover of a recent edition of Coast Connection said the thirteen different B Connected Casinos were each giving away $1 million on President’s Day, February 20. No other details were provided. But a $13 million promotion certainly attracts my attention.
My plan prior to receiving this news was that I would be playing at South Point, Silverton, and Palms on that day. Each of those casinos will be having promotions that day that I think are attractive — but at the same time skipping play at any or all of these casinos wouldn’t be the end of the world. Especially if there were a really great promotion at one or more of the Coast casinos.
The first thing to do was to get the rules to find out what was happening. This is normally easy to do. Not this time. There was no information at all at the Gold Coast and I had to ask several times at Sam’s Town to find out. And even when I got the rules, nobody at the Sam’s Town slot club knew what the promotion was all about.
It turns out this is a “corporate” promotion and the individual casinos aren’t too concerned about it. Each is scheduled to give away a potential $1 million, but they aren’t concerned about it. Does this seem strange to you too? When a casino like the South Point is giving away $800,000, they blast that information everywhere.
The gist of the promotion is you go into these casinos between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. and put your card in any machine. If it says “$500 Winner” you’ve won. If it doesn’t, you haven’t. Fairly simple.
Gold Coast has run this sort of promotion in the past. They randomly select 500 players from among their active players and give away $500 in free play. I never made a trip for this because there are too many active players to give me any sort of realistic chance. The new promotion is different in two respects. First of all, they are giving the award to 2,000 players — which sounds good for the players. It’s easy to conclude that 2,000 players receiving $500 is better than only 500 players receiving this. Except that you’d be wrong to conclude this.
Most of the 2000 “winners” are inactive players. The distribution is as follows:
Players who played in 2008 and not since — 485 winners
Players who played in 2009 and not since — 485 winners
Players who played in 2010 and not since — 485 winners
Players who played in 2011 and not since — 485 winners
Players who played between January 1, 2012 and February 13, 2012 — 60 winners.
There could be a lot of reasons why somebody hasn’t played at Orleans since 2008. Some are: they are dead; they live out of state and haven’t been back to Las Vegas in four years; they don’t receive mail anymore from the Orleans so don’t play there; they’ve given up gambling; etc.
I’m sure you can come up with other explanations as well, but if somebody hasn’t played $1 in a particular casino in four years, it’s fair to call them “inactive.” How many of these 500 inactive winners from 2008 do you think will hear about the promotion and actually come in to claim their money? If you predict they will give away the $500 to two players out of the 485 from 2008 your guess is higher than mine.
The truly active players have played there in early 2012 — and only 60 of us get selected. If they have had 60,000 players so far this year, each has a 1-in-1,000 chance to win $500. This makes the EV of going in to check worth 50¢. This is not worth anybody’s time or gas unless you happen to playing in the casino anyway.
My guess of 60,000 players this year is just that. A guess. Maybe high. Maybe low. I have no way of knowing for sure. It’s unlikely to be far enough off to justify a special trip into one of these casinos to check to see if you won.
In 2011 the powers that be at the Orleans decided to stop sending me mailers. I stopped playing there at that point because the machines there for stakes that interest me are way too tight unless you’re receiving big multipliers — and generally speaking only people who receive the mailers get the big multipliers.
But for purposes of the current promotion, since I last played there in 2011 my equity is better than if I was still in good standing and had played in 2012. There will be 485 winners based on 2011 play — and anybody who also played in 2012 isn’t in the running for this. There may be 200,000 or so people eligible, but since 485 of them earn $500, this makes the equity worth $1.21. This is technically higher than the 50¢ of equity active players get, but in actuality it’s a tie. Neither number is high enough to justify a trip in to play.
I was at the Gold Coast drawing this past Saturday night. The typical format there is that in the 10 minutes prior to each drawing, one of the executives announce over the loud speaker all of the upcoming promotions at the casino. Not one word was mentioned about February 20, which was only nine days in the future at that point. Who knows whether they will announce it at all?
Gold Coast has a “Young at Heart” (YAH) senior day on Mondays (point multipliers, free tournament, buffet discount) and that promotion attracts extra people. I go in sometimes myself — depending on what else is going on elsewhere. Surely there will be players coming in next Monday to play the YAH promotion and find out that they have won $500. Gold Coast will probably give away more money in this promotion than the other properties simply because they have their YAH day on the same day of the week as corporate decided to hold the drawing and the other casinos have their YAH on another day of the week.
Of the promised $13 Million in the giveaway I’d be very surprised if more than $250,000 is given away at all thirteen properties combined. I’ll likely never know for sure as these numbers aren’t published.
Is it legal for a group of casinos say that they’re going to be giving away $1,000,000 apiece while actually only giving away $20,000 or so apiece? Probably. They will each be picking out 2,000 names and are prepared to give $500 in free play away to every one of those 2,000 who actually come in and claim the money. It’s not the casinos’ fault if most of the names drawn are out of state, dead, or haven’t even heard about the promotion.
It’s a pretty misleading way to run a promotion. But it’s likely legal.
I’m not mad at Coast Casinos or other Boyd properties. I play quite a bit at both Gold Coast and Sam’s Town — and I even teach classes at Sam’s Town during the summer. Just because you like casinos overall doesn’t mean you have to like everything about them. And I am disappointed in the sneakily misleading numbers on this particular promotion.