Author’s note: I am posting two articles today, September 9, and none next week. This article tells of a September South Point promotion that is good for the player community and will expire September 30. Therefore I didn’t want to delay it another week.
Should You Make a Fuss?
In the “good old days” casino drawings used paper tickets. Now drawings in most casinos use electronic tickets, but on occasion you can still find drawings where paper tickets are being used.
Many players give some sort of an accordion fold to their tickets before they drop them in the drum. The theory is that a fold creates some extra air space around the ticket and is more likely to be chosen than one that is merely thrown into the drum without folding.
I’m not positive this works — but I do it anyway. I’ve won enough of these drawings over the years that I’m a believer. Also I try to get my ticket(s) in relatively late. The early tickets get squashed and all the folding is flattened out. Also, some drums are too small to have the actual number of tickets be mixed thoroughly and the first ones in have a much smaller chance of being called than the last ones in.
Some drawings have had wording saying something like: Tickets may not be folded. A folded ticket is grounds for disqualification.
If that is in the rules, we have a whole new ballgame. The rule itself is easy to understand. What is unknown is “Will the casino enforce the rule?” In addition to certain players, sometimes the person conducting the drawing hasn’t read the rules either.
Let’s say that you have some tickets and, because you read and understood the rules, you placed your tickets into the drum without folding them. Further, assume at the drawing itself, the ticket drawn for the biggest prize has a complex accordion fold. Despite the rule, the casino seems ready to give Sammy, the owner of the ticket, the first prize of $5,000.
So what do you do? The fact that you followed clear rules and somebody violated those rules so as to give himself an advantage hurts your equity. Even if they disqualified Sammy’s ticket, the most likely result is you still wouldn’t be called — but you could have been.
One question is: Was Sammy cheating? And the answer is: Who knows?
A considerable percentage of players don’t read the rules. And unless the casino had this rule for a long time and you knew Sammy had been to previous drawings, it’s hard to know what Sammy knew. It’s possible he knew the rule and was willing to gamble the house wouldn’t enforce the rule. Is that cheating or being an intelligent gambler?
If you’re going to speak up, you have to do so NOW. Once the prizes have been awarded and the crowd dispersed, there is no chance of any remedy. But if you do speak up NOW, that’s not without some downside. Depending on how you phrase things, the casino employees could consider YOU to be a trouble maker and take actions accordingly that you won’t like. Sammy and his friends might not speak to you again — or maybe take more drastic action. It would be easy to see how he could believe that he would have won $5,000 except for you and your big mouth. A lot of people wouldn’t just shrug that off.
If you’re already a frequent winner in these drawings and Sammy isn’t, the crowd will turn on you for being greedy. You might not give a damn what people think about you, but casinos are sometimes responsive to their players. If a high percentage of the casino patrons are against you, the easiest way to eliminate the problem is to eliminate you. If you are on shaky grounds because you’ve won in the casino and the casino is trying to decide whether to allow you to continue playing or not, this would not be a good time to publicly complain about the way the casino is doing things.
In my opinion, the best way to deal with this is proactively. When you read the rules and see such a line, encourage the marketing director to place a big sign near the drum saying that folded tickets are disqualified. With that big sign there, now everybody knows the rules — including the people running the drawing.
Good Thing the Machine Malfunctioned
Regular readers of my column know that I don’t pay a lot of attention to specific results. The most important thing to me is to put myself in position to win. Over time good things will happen. Whether or not I cash this particular time is more interesting to others than to me. But, as you shall see, today’s story is a bit different.
This month, September, 2014, the South Point is holding a nice promotion in which I am participating daily. Every day there’s a drawing. One person will win $10,000 guaranteed and fifteen others will each receive $500. All of the $500 winners have twenty-four hours to claim their prizes.
The promotion works as follows: The South Point calls one name at 8:15 p.m. for $10,000. If that person is able to reach the promotion location within four minutes, they award the money and post names of the fifteen $500 winners. If the “grand prize” winner isn’t present, that person goes on the $500 list and they call a new name for the grand prize. It sometimes takes two, three, or four times to find a grand prize winner present, but eventually they do and then they fill up the remaining spaces they have with names of $500 winners.
While similar in some ways to the casino’s “Car a Day” promotion that they run once a year, there are some critical differences. Fortunately, some of these differences benefit me. The features that are important to me, one way or the other, are:
1. You can earn 10,000 drawing tickets a day. This requires $10,000 coin-in at video poker or $3,334 at slots. In previous drawings, they limited to $1,250 per day the amount you had to play in order to get the maximum number of tickets. This change is good for me. Ten thousand dollars coin-in is an easily manageable amount of play for me — and it’s WAY more than a lot of their players play. Therefore, relatively speaking, I have a better than average chance at winning.
2. At the South Point, they allow play on your spouse’s card. Bonnie has no video poker skills and it’s not in the game plan to teach her, but on $1 Ten Play Quick Quads, it’s just another twenty minutes for me to earn her 10,000 points once I am already there. Even though we live only five miles away from the casino, it take more time to travel back and forth, park the car, and travel to and from the machine, than it does to play the 10,000 points.
3. The two games I considered playing for this promotion were $2 NSU single-line (99.73%), at which I can play $10,000 coin-in per hour, or $1 Ten Play Quick Quads (99.65%), at which I can play $30,000 coin-in per hour. With a 0.30% cash-or-free play slot club, both games are “essentially even.” I will earn some mailers for our play, although I don’t know how big they will be. In the past few months, Bonnie and I have each had weekly mailers as small as $10 and some as large as $75. Part of the South Point’s formula for mailers involves how much we play and part of it concerns whether we win or lose.
4. The drum is emptied every night after the drawing and at 9 p.m. you can begin to earn tickets for the next night’s drawing. This is a big change from before. In the past, they would keep the tickets in the drum all month long — which benefited local players who could and would play every day. Now out-of-towners who are in town for a day or two can participate fully. As a local, this is a rule change that is not in my favor. (I’m reporting here, not complaining. I don’t expect any casino to ever sit down and say, “We want to design a promotion that gives Bob Dancer the biggest advantage.”)
5. You can earn tickets beginning at 9 p.m. the night before the drawing, but you can only activate your tickets between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on the day of the drawing. I personally hate this rule. Sometimes playing during “the graveyard shift” is convenient for me. I’d prefer to activate my tickets and “be done with it for today.” The casino, however, wants their winners to be present. They do not want to have to draw five or more names before the $10,000 grand prize winner shows up. And they believe that if they let people activate their tickets too early, the chances increase for a “no show” of the winners. They are probably correct in their analysis. I still hate the rule.
Part of the analysis of this or any promotion is: “How often will you win?” Using an approximation of 3.2 million tickets in the barrel (to make the math easier), if they draw sixteen winners and I have 10,000 tickets in the drum, I have a 1-in-20 chance each night to win. Since I have two entries (Bonnie’s and mine), I have a 1-in-10 chance to win. This means we’ll be called “about” three times over the month.
If there are more than 3.2 million tickets, our names will be called less often. If there are fewer tickets, we’ll get called more often. As a fact of “casino life,” I expect the fewest tickets in the drum Monday and Tuesday evenings, which means our chances are better on those two days.
Assuming we collect three $500 prizes over the month for $600,000 coin-in (i.e. $10,000 per day x 30 days x 2 people) , this adds 0.25% to our expected return — which “almost” makes it equivalent to double points (which would be an extra 0.30% at the South Point) up to the first $10,000 of coin-in per day.
So how often should we show up for the drawing itself? Assuming my numbers are correct, each of us will have a 1-in-320 chance to win $10,000 — which makes being there worth $30 each time. Personally I don’t show up at drawings unless my expected win is at least $200 each time. It’s too much hassle for too little gain.
Still, our plan is to show up “on occasion.” If we have food coupons at M or Silverton, which are each three miles or so down the road, we’ll schedule it so we can be at the South Point at 8:15. Bonnie and I each have $15 food coupons this month from our South Point mailers (which perfectly cover the price of the dinner buffets when used with our South Point cards), so one of the nights we’ll eat at the buffet and then go to the drawing. We like dancing to Wes Winters in the Grandview Lounge from 6-9 on Fridays and Saturdays, so we’ll see more of Wes Winters in September than we did in August. Still, most nights we’re simply not going to be there at 8:15. If one of us gets called, we’ll happily collect $500 the next day.
On Wednesday, September 3, Bonnie was called for $500. We were at a dance class when one of our friends called us with the news. Bonnie wanted to drop everything and go collect her money right then. I convinced her that we were going to go there the next day anyway to play and activate our tickets and it was a wasted trip to go at that moment. She reluctantly agreed with my analysis and finally acquiesced in waiting until the next day.
On Thursday, September 4, the ticket drum got too full. I wasn’t aware of this (until the next day) because I was hosting a radio show from 7-8 p.m. across town (the studio is on Sahara near Rainbow — perhaps a half hour away from the casino). I wasn’t going to rush, rush, rush after the show and probably be late anyway. So that night wasn’t going to be one where I was present for the drawing. No big deal. There were going to be 25 or so more drawings during the remainder of the month.
It turned out that the drawing drum malfunctioned that night. Apparently September 4 was the first time that they had exceeded 2.5 million virtual tickets and their system couldn’t handle it. It’s a brand new system and you can bet frantic phone calls were made between the South Point and the system manufacturer.
After an hour of futility with the drum, they finally announced that when they got the problem worked out, sixteen names would be drawn and the names would be posted on their website www.southpointcasino.com . All sixteen would have until 8 p.m. the following night to collect. They don’t normally post winners on their website because they want players to actually come into the casino to check. And if players come in, a certain percentage of them will gamble.
As it turned out (if not there wouldn’t be this story today), my name was called first. Under the previously announced rules, since I wasn’t there I would have collected $500. But because of special rules that were made about an hour before they got the virtual drum fixed, I benefited and would collect $10,000 if I claimed it before 8 p.m. the next day. I knew none of this at the time.
When I checked my email the next day, I received a message from somebody whose name I didn’t recognize telling me of my good fortune and suggesting that if there was any chance I wouldn’t have picked up the money without his email, a “finder’s fee” of 10% (i.e. $1,000) just might be appropriate.
I emailed back and explained that I definitely would have found out about it because I was planning to be there that day to check the previous night’s drawing and to play for that night’s drawing, plus I expected to get other emails and phone calls from friends who recognized my name (I received four such notifications). But since this person wasn’t on my normal “support team” list, I told him I’d happily give him $100 if he came by while I was playing Friday afternoon. He did. I definitely recognized his face, though not his name. And I paid him.
I even got a call from Michael Gaughan, owner of the South Point, telling me to come in and get my money. He wanted to know why I wasn’t there the night before. I explained to him that I was hosting a radio show of which he was one of the sponsors, thank you very much, so it was really partly his own damned fault.
He then told me to collect my money but I owed him $9,500 because I really should have collected only $500 according to the rules rather than $10,000. I was pretty sure he was just pulling my chain. But I wasn’t positive. So I said, “If you’re serious, okay.” He laughed, said he was just teasing, and offered his congratulations. I thought it was a pretty cool call.
And Mr. Gaughan also told me in that phone call that the drum overflowed at 2.5 million tickets. That meant my earlier estimate was off and that our chances of being called each night were actually higher than I had previously estimated. This was on a Thursday night early in the promotion. Weekend nights will have more tickets and probably later in the month, as more people hear about it, there will likely be more participation in the drawing.
As it turned out, Bonnie’s name was also on the list of $500 winners on the casino’s website. Normally I would have gone to collect the money by myself and when I saw her name I would have called and told her she had until 8 o’clock to come by and pick up her money. But since we knew before leaving home that we were both winners, we went together. She was happier about her $500 than she was about my $10,000. Go figure.
The fact that we’ve won three times between us in the first week of the promotion doesn’t mean we should stop playing. I’m writing this on Saturday, September 6, after we already know that we didn’t get called Friday night. But from this position, I’m figuring that we should still probably be called a couple more times this month. We’ll see.
If I should be called first again, I automatically will get $500 whether I’m there at 8:15 or not because everyone is limited to only one of the $10,000 prizes per month. But Bonnie wants to win her $10,000 and so she’s already lobbying for us to be dancing to Wes Winters next Saturday night. Her lobbying will probably be successful.
Another Author’s note: Another semester of free video poker classes begins tomorrow September 10 at noon in the Grandview Lounge at the South Point. All players at least 21 years of age are welcome to attend.