This past Saturday, August 23, the Palms casino in Las Vegas hosted a $50,000 slot tournament. This was a tournament where, so far as I know, extremely limited skill was required. As long as you were hitting the button whenever the reels were stopped, you were going to get the maximum score that your particular machine would allow for that session. Whether it was a little or a lot was dependent on the luck of the draw.
To be eligible for the tournament, you had to play $40,000 coin-in at video poker or $2,500 coin-in on a slot machine during the previous four days. Due to their “Play for Prizes” program, you also earned a $100 Albertson’s gift card for that much play. In addition, there are monthly mailers, a 0.25% slot club, and a weekly drawing. And players can often talk the hosts into extra food comps.
There was an optional second entry that you could buy for $50.
This was a good enough deal that I played the requisite $40,000 through a video poker machine that week. When I signed up for the tournament, I asked what maximum number of entries was possible in the tournament given the number of seats and number of sessions. I was told that if they completely sold out, there would be a maximum of 390 total entries (including comped entries, if any, earned entries, and $50 buy-in entries.) Quickly I divided $50,000 (the total prize pool) by 390 and determined that the average value of each entry was $128 if they sold out. It could be worth quite a bit more if they didn’t sell out. To buy this entry for $50 was an excellent deal.
This is what intelligent gambling is all about! Whenever I can get $128 in value for $50 (assuming the variance isn’t absolutely horrendous — which this wasn’t since prizes were going to be 100-deep), I’ll take it any day of the week. It would be nice if I could get such a deal over and over again. But even if it’s a one-time deal and the $50 isn’t “life or death” money, I’ll invest. A real no brainer.
The Palms did it up right. They hired Robbie Howard, one of the emcees who work for the ProNouncer organization. This company, owned by emcee extraordinaire Kelly Flynn, provides the best emcees in town — bar none.
There were two 5 minute rounds with about an hour and a half between the rounds. Casinos frequently “make” you spend time in their casino between tournament rounds. Obviously they expect many of the contestants to gamble during that hour and a half. That’s the way they can afford to give away that much money. An hour and a half wait is probably a good compromise between no time at all and making the players hang out for several hours.
When you buy the second entry, they let you play back-to-back. That is, I played the first round of my two entries at 12:00 and 12:10 and the second round of those entries at 1:40 and 1:50. They also let you use substitute button pushers, so I played at noon and 1:40 while Bonnie played at 12:10 and 1:50.
Bonnie and I had a 50 cent side bet on our rounds. I won them both, officially earning $1. As is usual, I “forgot” to collect. When Bonnie wins these bets, she always collects. We make similar bets fairly often and she ends up collecting an extra $10 or $20 a month from me. Anybody who thinks this is not smart gambling on my part has no idea of the ramifications of the “happy wife-happy life” paradigm. Bonnie loves to win these bets. My life works pretty well!
But I digress.
In round numbers, 180 people qualified for and entered the tournament. There were many others who qualified, but Saturday afternoon wasn’t convenient for them; or perhaps the prizes were too small to interest them; or maybe they forgot; or maybe they didn’t read the email. Fine. The more surprising part to me was that only about 45 of these people paid the extra $50 for a “no-brainer” second entry.
Three out of four people passed up on a very good deal. They were already going to be at the casino, but they didn’t want to put up $50 in real cash money to take a reasonable risk worth $128. I just don’t understand.
These people were no strangers to gambling. Those qualifying on the video poker machines likely knew that playing $40,000 coin-in on video poker wasn’t a trivial feat. Even if they were playing 9/6 Jacks or Better, they knew that sometimes they could lose $4,000 or more playing that much. If they were playing a game with a higher variance, their possible loss was much greater.
They did, however, play video poker and faced these potential losses–hoping to win, of course and fully realizing that the expected loss on these games wasn’t nearly as high as the numbers in the preceding paragraph.
I went around asking people why they didn’t enter the second time. Below are some of the more typical answers.
One of my friends told me that he didn’t buy the second entry because he lost a lot of money playing to qualify and was disgusted. I could understand being disgusted at your score, but I didn’t understand how that would make you want to avoid paying $50 for something worth $128. Sometimes you have to take your disgust, put it into your back pocket, so to speak, and make the right decision whether you’re disgusted or not. I suspect this particular guy is worth well over a million dollars and even if he lost a couple of thousand playing to qualify, another $50 shouldn’t be a big deal.
Another player said he had to play another tournament elsewhere else in Las Vegas that day and didn’t have time to spend on another round at the Palms. In general, time management is an excellent consideration — but here we were talking about an extra 10 minutes. If there was room time-wise for one round at the Palms, there was probably room to stick around an extra ten minutes.
Still another player told me he didn’t enter because since he’d probably lose, he was really saving $50. Well he was right. He would probably lose. With 100 winners, more than half of the entries would end up with zero. But there was still $50,000 to be given out to the group. Somebody would win those prizes and it would all depend on luck. It’s not really how often you win that matters but what you win on average.
I hear a lot of complaining that today it’s tougher to win at the video poker game than it used to be. That is certainly true. However, when an opportunity does come around, you need to jump on it. Not taking advantage of the opportunities that are out there makes it even tougher to win.
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