This football season, as last, each Friday handicapping phenom Fezzik, who posts exclusively on the members-only LVASportsboards, will be contributing a weekly "Fezzik Fridays" Q&A to this column; here's this year's first contribution.
We all love free football contests. They're slam-dunk freerolls, so why not play them? The best are weeklies like the one at the Coasts that gives away $30,000 per week. In these you can swing by if it's convenient, put in your picks, and maybe get lucky and win big. But it's not quite that simple.
All contests, even these, have opportunity costs. Spending an hour to drive over, and thoroughly handicap your picks and apply the proper game-theory moves doesn't make a lot of sense if there are 100,000 entries out there. Sure, $30,000 in free money looks good, but that still averages out to an equity expectation of just 30ยข per person. OK, there's a lot of "dead money" in those 100,000 entries, so let's round the equity value up to $1 per play. Sorry, but $1-per-hour is not gonna get it done for a guy who's trying to make a living off these things.
Most of the low-rolling and freeroll contests fall under this description: The rewards don't justify the time spent for a serious player. The gambling pro, should he enter these contests, will likely take down one $2,000-type prize during his lifetime, while spending 2,000 hours that he could have used to make a six-figure profit with a proper allocation of time!
Even worse for a pro is the "free" year-long contest that refunds your entry fee provided you play all 17 NFL weeks (Station Casinos' Great Giveaway"). Uh oh! Now, young man, you have basically signed up for a $1/hour job ... and with the consequence that should you miss a week, you lose the "free" part of the deal. I know intelligent people who sign up for every Vegas low-stakes contest every year. And almost without exception, their life becomes a living hell, as they have to spend all day on Fridays putting in their picks.
What the low-roller contests are good for is regular customers who will either be at the casino anyway or who look for low-end gambling deals because they enjoy the entertainment value they provide. They get a nice shot to win a big payout and the time spent likely saves them money they'd be losing playing other gambling games. Anthony Curtis is a big advocate of this aspect of the free contests (see "Free Fun" in this week's "Football Update" at LVASports.com) and he's correct in that sentiment. Plus, since most pros surely feel as I do, you don't have to take on the big guns in the smaller tournaments.
Football contests can be both fun and profitable, but pros have to be careful in evaluating what they're getting into when they enter them and whether or not it really makes sense to tie up their time to play.
Editor's Note: For more on this, see 17 Long Weeks.
