How Would I Attack It?

A friend lives near the Hollywood Casino in Toledo, Ohio. In October and November, they ran a Thursday food drive promotion with the following features:

1. On Thursdays, everyone who brings a non-perishable food item spins for $5 – $500 free play.
2. Top five donators by weight every Thursday spin for between $100 – $500 free play.
3. Top donator by weight for entire nine Thursdays from October 4 – November 29 period receives $5,000 in free play.
4. See the player’s club for details.

In 2017, the casino totaled 8,000 pounds for the entire two-month promotional period.

For October of this year, the casino averaged 3,000 pounds of food a week among all players — which means 12,000 pounds while the promotion is only 4/9 of the way through. My friend said he could get canned food for 29 cents a pound and had a friend with a pickup truck who was willing to help out. His questions to me were: If this were me, would I “go for it” and what would be my strategy?

He also told me I could write about the promo after it was over, but he didn’t want me to encourage anybody else to compete against him.

First, I told him I wanted to see a copy of the rules. He told me he went to the club and they didn’t have any rules and were surprised that anybody would ask for rules on something this simple.

But it’s not so simple. I would like to see a better definition of “non-perishable.” Some things are obviously perishable or non-perishable. But what about flour? Dried beans? Other grains? Without an exhaustive search, on the Internet I found all-purpose flour in 50-pound bags where you needed to buy 50 or more bags at once to get the price of about 23 cents a pound. If this was going to be accepted, I might buy 50 bags and take them in over two or three Thursdays. But if they were going to be rejected as qualifying for the promotion, spending $600 for something essentially useless to me wouldn’t be smart.

On one Thursday I might bring in a two-pound bag of flour and see if that counted. If it did, I might “make my play.”

Second, I’d want some information on how much the “big players” were bringing in. Assuming I was going to bring in a few thousand pounds over the promotion, I wanted to have a good idea if that would be a winner. I suggested going to a pit boss or security guard and asking a question such as, “Has anybody ever brought in as much as 25 pounds?” The answer might be revealing. Asking about “only” 25 pounds might get you information without revealing that you were considering bringing in considerably more than that.

If you find out that one guy was bringing in 800 pounds a week, then this might be too expensive of a promotion to try to win.

If you bring in 2,000 pounds a week for five weeks in a row, you’ll definitely win some of the smaller prizes along the way. A few $500 prizes can help out a lot in financing your entries.

At the same time, word will spread among the other “big players,” and if they can predict how much you’ll bring in, they might well bring in just enough to beat you. Therefore, bringing in 1,000 pounds a week for four weeks and 6,000 pounds on the fifth week might be a better strategy.

The casino probably did not figure that someone would be bringing in the same type of food in great abundance. They probably figured they’d get a variety of food-types which would be appreciated by local food banks or whatever other charities this food drive was supporting.

It could well be that after the first or second week, they would institute a “Flour is no longer accepted” rule. Printed rules typically have a disclaimer such as “Management reserves all rights to change or modify these rules at its sole discretion.” Presumably unprinted rules give management even more discretion. It could easily occur that the first printed rules show up AFTER management has decided to limit certain items. Depending on your backlog at the point they enforced this rule, this could be expensive.

Let’s say your next-cheapest option is cans of generic-quality corn. After a ton or two of the same corn, a “No more corn” rule could also be added to the list.

My friend took a wait-and-see approach, considering possibly “coming out of nowhere” and bringing in 5,000 pounds the last week. Checking with a pit boss three weeks before the end, it seemed like one player had already brought in close to 6,000 pounds and that player only had a small edge over the second-place guy. Now it looked like 10,000 pounds minimum might be required, and who’s to say that would be enough? My friend backed out of the competition without even entering. I have no knowledge of the final numbers, obviously, because I’m publishing this a few days before the November 29 final collection day.

I don’t know the players in Toledo. Were this promotion in Vegas, I’m confident that a number of players would “go for it,” probably with ideas I haven’t even considered. There are a lot more gambling pros and semi-pros in Las Vegas who attack things strategically than there are in cities where casinos are a very small part of the economy.

It’s not that people in Las Vegas are inherently smarter than those in other places — in fact I’d suspect the opposite for many communities — it’s just that Las Vegas has a much bigger sub-community of gambling professionals than most other places. These people (including me) may well not be particularly bright at figuring out important things in life, but we are good at figuring out how to take money out of a casino.

If it turns out that 10,000 pounds is enough to win this contest in Toledo, it could well be that twice that number is required for the same promotion in Las Vegas. This is an important consideration. When you compete in such a promotion, you don’t want to be bringing a knife to a gunfight. There is only one $5,000 prize. It’s very expensive to come in second place.

An interesting caveat: Let’s say it’s one week to go, you’re tied with somebody else for the lead, and you’ve already spent $6,500 to buy the food you’re giving away. Assuming you cannot (or will not) enter into a deal with your competition, it can make a lot of sense to spend another $3,000 to try to win.

If you do win, you will have spent $9,500 and won $5,000 for a $4,500 loss. If you spend nothing the last week, you will not win and will have lost $6,500. Losing $4,500 is a lot better than losing $6,500.

One thing that is certain is that anybody who finds out you spent $9,500 and only won $5,000 will tell you what an idiot you are. They will “patiently” explain that it makes no sense to spend more than you can possibly win.

Except they’d be wrong. The “original” minus $6,500 score is irrelevant. If spending another $3,000 will gain you $5,000, it’s money well spent. But don’t try to explain that to a ploppy.