Kevin.
Get over it. Some promotions target the low roller by capping the number of tickets one can earn or giving tons of free tickets and making tickets difficult to earn. Focus on those. Other promotions are designed to get increased play and are designed to REWARD those who bet a lot, not the quarter VP player who is worth next to nothing to a casino.
Personally, if I were running a casino promotion, I would ALWAYS give tickets based on coin in, would NEVER give any free tickets, and would ALWAYS give about 10x more tickets per dollar wagered to slot/keno players. The other thing I would do is give a lot of smallish prizes. If my promotion was to give out 20K, I’d give out 40 prizes of $500. If I did give out a big prize, each small prize winner would be given an equal chance to win it. The Bob Dancers of the world would probably not see these kinds of promotions as being worth their time because they would be hard pressed to dominate the ticket drum and the ploppies would receive most of the tickets and win most of the prizes.

I don’t understand the people who hate drawings because of the big players. People like Dancer can be down a few thousand dollars prior to the drawing while the quarter player may be down $100. Should he not have a proportionate number of tickets for his investment? If the quarter player is putting in the same time learning the games and plays at the same level, they most likely have a technically higher EV because the first few tickets are often free or practically free. (Yes you may have to play for decades to realize that advantage, but it does exist.) If you know there are 10,000 tickets in the barrel, it does not matter if 10 are yours and 9990 belong to a single person or 5000 other people. (They still have a 99.9% chance of winning) Now if you think that without the pro’s there would only be 2000 tickets in the barrel, you would have a point. That still does not mean I am mad at them, just like I would not enter a poker tournament if many of the players were top professional players. With no animosity, I would just stay away from that promotion.

That is why we read Jean Scott’s posts along with many other sites to try and decide what works for us. The casino is not running promotions for the advantage player. They are looking for the recreational player who is happy to drop a few bucks each week for the fun. We are the ones trying to take advantage of the casinos. The vast majority of us that patronize this blog are in fact part-time players looking to cut the house edge knowing full well either we don’t have the time, energy or perhaps the desire to become actual advantage players. (Just less disadvantaged)

The vast majority of casino players just want to have fun and budget accordingly. Any little incentives or rewards are looked at as freebies because they were going to drop their allocation into the machines anyway. I applaud them. They are having fun and life should be full of fun. I don’t look down on them in any way and I love playing next to them because they are fun to be around.

That said, I want to know the rules up-front, fine print and all. I am there to have fun, but I guess I am not an “Idiot”. Well perhaps I am because I like spending Friday nights drinking and playing Pai-Gow poker. Perhaps not because on average I spend less than my brother who likes to play pool and drink on Friday’s. My point being is that sometimes it really is a win-win situation.