I received an email from someone named Al asking about slot and video poker tournaments in which you have to play to earn an entry. He wanted to know, basically, whether or not it’s worth it to participate.
An example of this type of contest is the Thursday senior slot tournament at the South Point which has a prize pool of $5,200. If you are at least 50 years of age, you receive one free entry. Earning 250 or 500 points entitles you to one or two additional entries.
One key element to consider in deciding whether to enter this tournament is determining the total number of entries. If they have 520 entries, each entry is worth $10. If there are 1040 entries, each entry is worth $5. I personally have no idea of how many entries they get. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it is 2,000 or more. Perhaps they will tell if you ask.
Another key element to consider is the cost of each entry. The South Point has NSU Deuces Wild (99.73% if you know what you’re doing) and a 0.30% slot club. This means that the game returns 100.03% on average. Playing $500 coin-in (which, at $1 = 1 point, would earn the maximum of two additional entries) gives you an EV of +15¢ on average (with considerable variance). This means the extra entries are essentially free — although few things in the short term are exactly average.
A third thing to consider is estimating how much time it would take to both earn additional entries and play in the tournament. If you don’t participate, what else do you have to do with your time? Some seniors have nothing but time — and for them I suggest that, sure, this is a good bet. For me, I figure it would require almost an hour to earn the two additional entries and then play the three rounds of the tournament. For a return of $5 or less on average, I’m just not interested. But if this same deal was available twenty years ago when I had a very small bankroll and was struggling to make it, I would have jumped at the opportunity.
An example of a video poker tournament where you need to play to receive an entry may be found at the Gold Coast. If you earn 50 points on Thursdays (at least in June), you will receive one entry into their $2,500 video poker tournament. They have NSU Deuces Wild at the Gold Coast as well, and Emerald players earn 0.30% cash back. That makes NSU Deuces Wild, again, essentially an even game. Lesser-tiered players earn either 0.20% or 0.10%, depending on how much they’ve played at all the B Connected casinos combined over the previous six months. Still, with only $50 coin-in required ($1 = 1 point), it’s only a 5¢ or 10¢ hit in EV if you belong to one of the lower tiers.
Once again it depends on how many people enter. If 500 people enter, each entry is worth $5. Except there’s a twist. While there’s considerable luck in a video poker tournament, there is also some room for skill. A major area where skill can be a determining factor is in the speed of your play. The Gold Coast tournaments, I believe, give you 10 minutes to earn as many credits as you can. If you can play ten or twenty more hands than the average entrant, this increases your EV. Also, the choice of which cards to hold is important. I’ve written some articles about video poker tournament strategy and if you search my back columns, you’ll find several of them.
Again, it is important to consider 1) how much time will it take to earn the entry and play in the tournament, 2) how much enjoyment do you get from participating in the tournament, and 3) what other money-making options and enjoyment options are available to you? For me, these events are too time-consuming and don’t offer enough of a reward to make them interesting. But there was a time in my life when I would have chosen differently.
Another question to be answered before entering any tournament is: Can you stand to lose? Possibly one out of ten times, you might win $25. One out of twenty times, you might get more than that. The rest of the time, you will likely win nothing. That’s a lot of times that you end up with zero. Some players take zero scores rather personally. If they get zero nine times in a row, they sometimes feel that they are just terminally unlucky and they quit. If that’s the way you feel, it might be best to not even try these contests because you ARE going to end up with zero most of the time.
There are an infinite number of variations on this theme. At the M a few years ago in a four- round tournament, they would double your lowest score if you played $20,000 coin-in over the weekend. If you didn’t play that much, you essentially had almost a zero chance to win. In this case, you had to look at the EV of playing $20,000 coin-in on the game you were planning to play. For some reason, many players would enter the tournament and then not play sufficiently. This made no sense to me. Other players would play the tournament rounds first and then only play through the $20,000 if they scored well enough for it to make a difference. This definitely makes sense, but if, coincidental to the tournament, you got double cash back the first day of the tournament and single cash back the second, waiting to play your $20,000 coin-in on the second day forced you to give up $60 in EV (.30% x $20,000 = $60 versus .60% x $20,000 = $120).
There are other possibilities as well, and each one must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Still, this article should give you some ideas about how to do that analysis.