I was playing at South Point for double points on Memorial Day, Monday May 30. Double points at that casino are valuable to me. A rather infinitesimal bonus for being there at 8:20 p.m. is that if they called my name for first prize in the “$800,000 Win A Toyota A Day” promotion, I’d get an extra $500 in gas cards if I claimed the prize within 25 minutes. If I won second or third place ($250 in gas cards apiece), an extra $250 in gas cards would be mine. But since there would likely be 4,000 entries in the contest, the chances for any of this were pretty slim. Clearly less than an extra $1 in equity for being there and I wouldn’t make a special trip if the play wasn’t otherwise attractive. But it was, so I was there.
They didn’t call my name. No surprise there. But they did call Shirley’s! Whoa! What’s this?
First thing I did was to call Shirley and ask her if she could get there within 25 minutes for an extra $500 of Chevron? When she stopped screaming in excitement, her answer was, “Yes. Where do I go?”
My answer was, “Start driving. I’ll go down to the Grandview Lounge and then figure out which doorway to lead you to. It’ll take me a few minutes to do this, but in the meantime, get on the freeway and keep your cell phone handy!”
I met her at the right entrance. I took her car to go park it, while she ran in to collect her booty. I don’t know exactly how much time to spare she had, but she got the extra gas cards. The “less than $1 in extra equity” turned out to be $500 this time — in addition to the car itself.
We received a lot of congratulatory calls, which was nice. It was also a little embarrassing. After all, the economy sucks right now and Shirley and I are better off financially than most people. Winning a car worth $28,000 or so (or $17,500 in cash), plus $500 in gas, is not a life-changing event for us. I experience ten days a year or more when my daily gambling results, either plus or minus, are bigger than this. It’s easy to believe that life would be “fairer” if someone needier won the car rather than us. Despite this view of fairness, we were delighted to win.
Somebody else was telling me what a long shot win this was for us, and how it seems to him that we get lucky “all the time.” I disagree.
First let’s look at how long the odds were on this. The average number of entries in this event was about 3,000 a day. (I didn’t make this number up, although I did round it off. The high number of entries before Memorial Day was less than 3,500, and some days had 1,200 or less. Probably Memorial Day itself had more because the double point promotion brought a lot of additional players in.) Since Shirley and I both entered 30 days, the odds were only 1-in-50 that we’d win one of the days.
Actually, the odds were a lot shorter than that. If you played $1,250 a day and swiped your card at the kiosk, you earned a maximum of 255 entries per day. While $1,250 is a relatively modest amount, there are a lot of people who won’t gamble anywhere near that much. And while you could earn a total of 255 entries per day, your entries added up over the month. By day 30, we had 7750 entries apiece. The average for the 4,000 (this is a guess) entrants on Memorial Day was probably 1,500 or less. Most people didn’t enter every day. Most people didn’t play at least $1,250 a day. Those who did had a much better chance of winning than someone entering once or twice only.
Another factor is that the rules at South Point allow players to play on their spouses cards. Some casinos do this, some don’t. When the rules permit it, I take advantage of it. Since $2,500 a day isn’t so much for me, this does give me twice as much of a chance as people without spouses.
So maybe the total odds against either or both of us for winning some time during the month were somewhere in the range of 15-to-1 or so. Not so much of a long shot, and this time it came through. The key element to winning this time was to play your $1,250 every day and entering. It wasn’t difficult to do, depending on where you live and what your other priorities and responsibilities are, but relatively few people did this.
I asked the guy who told me how lucky I was how many times he entered. He told me none at all because he’s really unlucky and he never wins anything. He felt it was a waste of time to enter.
I suggested that a better explanation for his lack of winning was a lack of entering! If my 1-in-15 odds is approximately correct (it was based on some “reasonable” assumptions that might be off one way or another), the average monthly gift to me for showing up every day was about $1,500. Or about $25 each per day. For playing a modest amount on an even game (99.73% for NSU Deuces Wild with a 0.30% slot club). A very generous gift from the South Point that most people failed to take advantage of. (Even more generous of the South Point is the fact that the casino would pay your sale tax and registration fees. This is $2,500 or so over and above the price of the car. Plus, if you wanted a higher end car, they would pay the first $28,000 towards whatever Finley Toyota would sell you. Thank you Michael Gaughan!)
Yes $25 a day is a long term average, but that’s how you make gambling decisions. You put yourself in position over and over again to win and over time the money comes in. This “grinding” is one way to be a success at gambling.
If you were paid $25 a day in cash by the South Point, would you have shown up every day and played $1,250 on an even game? If the answer is “yes” but you didn’t actually do it, is the reason because you didn’t evaluate this as a $25 per day apiece opportunity? And do you call the people who did figure this out and take the time to put themselves into position to win lucky or simply taking care of business?
And this $25 a day average was more like $10 a day in the early part of the month and $40 a day in the latter part of the month — assuming you entered every day. If you only entered half the time, your average probably was about $15 a day.
Every drawing is like that, to some degree. A few days previously I was at the weekly drawing at the Silverton and the drawing two hours later for a new car. I had $200,000 worth of weekly play and more than twice that much for the monthly play. These are fairly large numbers for this particular casino. I got called neither time. Such is life. My equity in showing up that night was probably $1,000 or more. I ended up with zero. This is the usual result. You usually don’t win. But when you do, you can win big time.
The times you don’t are not particularly “unlucky.” There have been many drawings where I’ve had the most tickets in the drum and didn’t win a good prize. At the same time, having a total of $80 in equity at the South Point on Memorial Day (i.e. Shirley and me both having $40 in equity) occasionally turns into $28,000. But I don’t see that as being particularly lucky. I regularly put myself in position to succeed. Success is an expected and frequent result. I just don’t know when it will happen next.
Players who look at May 30 all by itself will conclude I was lucky to score on that particular day. And I suppose they are correct from that point of view. However, I see that there are 50-100 occasions every year where I can win a car, and I’ve been doing this for several years and will continue indefinitely into the future. Sometimes the odds are really long (perhaps 1-in-20,000 or worse) and sometimes the odds aren’t nearly so long (1-in-15 in the latest case). It would be a far bigger surprise if I never won a car. I’ve won cars in the past, and will probably win cars in the future. It’s even possible that I win a Ford Focus later this month at the Palms. There is no need to attach a “lucky” label on the few occasions when I win a big prize or an “unlucky” label on the many occasions when I don’t.
These labels don’t tell us anything. They are merely after-the-fact words that don’t say much about what the odds and/or effort were to winning the prize. Or how many times you were in a similar position to win and didn’t. But whether it’s correct to call it lucky or not, Shirley is delighted and happy to get a new Toyota Sienna.