It’s been a while since I’ve written about casino drawings. In Part I, I’m going to address a selective history of drawings. And Part II deals with how to improve your chances in drawings.
My personal history deals primarily, but not exclusively, with drawings in Las Vegas starting in 1994. The ways they did it in Atlantic City and other places are mostly a mystery to me.
While most casinos held drawings similarly to the way other casinos did it, any marketing director could say, “I’ve got a good idea. Why don’t we . . .?,” and you had a different twist on how to do it.
“In the beginning,” drawings used paper tickets on which you filled out your name and player’s card number. Sometimes you needed additional information like your address. If you had a lot of tickets, you had to allow considerable time to prepare them. Using rubber stamps or address labels made it faster than doing everything longhand, but it still required an effort.
Some players believed that folding the tickets was useful, and many players had their own techniques. Some casino executives drawing the tickets felt that folded tickets provided an unfair advantage, so they would intentionally feel around for unfolded tickets. I was never sure, so I folded half of mine and left the others au naturel.
The tickets had to go into some sort of drum. If the drum was large, say able to hold 20,000 tickets, and there were only 500 tickets in the drum, spinning the drum mixed the tickets pretty well. If that same drum was filled with 22,000 tickets, the tickets were so jammed that no matter how many times they spun the drum, the tickets stayed right where they were. In this kind of drawing, it was vital to place your tickets in the drum within the last half hour or so before the drawing. If your tickets were placed before that and are now at the bottom of the drum, you had zero chance of it being picked. Someone might dig down one foot or so into a batch of tickets to get one, but nobody could dig down six feet.
You usually received tickets based on your play — maybe every 1,000 slot club points earned you one ticket. Sometimes different tier levels received different numbers of tickets per slot club points. Sometimes video poker machines earned tickets at a different rate than slot machines. Sometimes there were “ticket multiplier” days. Sometimes everybody received free tickets.
Often, but not always, you had to be present to win. Often, but not always, if somebody called wasn’t present, they drew again. Sometimes you could win two or more prizes if your name were drawn more than once. Sometimes anybody could enter and win a drawing, but sometimes it was only for invited guests.
Sometimes the first name drawn gets the biggest prize. Sometimes they keep drawing until they get the right number of names, and then each of the contestants picks an envelope, spins a wheel, or does something else to decide how much they have won.
In Nevada, usually the drawings were fair — but more than once a casino was caught cheating. I have to assume that sometimes casinos cheated and were not caught. It isn’t that difficult for a casino employee to have a ticket palmed when he/she reaches in to pick out a ticket. If done well, it’s extremely difficult to catch.
I’ve entered many hundreds of Vegas drawings over the past 30 years — possibly more than one thousand. I don’t know the total amount of prizes I’ve won, but it easily exceeds $1 million, including cash, free play, and sometimes physical prizes like cars, jewelry, and even cruises. That’s not all profit, of course. Sometimes I had to play a negative game to earn drawing tickets.
Sometimes there were cash or free play options. For example, if your name were drawn for a $25,000 car, the casino would arrange for you to buy any car you wanted at, for example, Finley Toyota, or would offer you $20,000 if you didn’t take the car.
Sometimes casinos issued 1099s when you won at least $600. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes, if you won more than one drawing over the calendar year, the casino would sum up your prizes and present you with the tax form if your total winnings were at least $600. Sometimes casinos would treat each drawing as a separate event tax-wise.
Next week I’ll discuss how drawings are different today than they used to be and give you some pointers on doing well in these drawings.
I think that the physics of tickets moving after they’ve been put in a drum is way more complicated than the brief passage about this factor stated. One element that needs to be discussed is “mounding”: whether the tickets have mainly been deposited right in the center (horizontally), which could be unavoidable depending on the size & shape of the insertion hole. If this is totally or overwhelmingly the case, then as more tickets are put in, they will tend to fall/slide to the left or right, and down, possibly winding up on the far left or far right, with a sort-of 3D bell curve forming, and they would likely have zero chance of being drawn. In this scenario, it is possible that tickets deposited during the last half-hour could slide to the horizontal extremes and almost certainly would not get selected. There is also no physics element that would move noncentral tickets (those that are noticeably to the left or right of center) towards the center (where the selector person would likely insert his/her hand). So the tickets that have the best chance of winding up in the horizontal center would be those that are deposited earlier rather than later. Then there’s also the factor of how many times the drum will be rotated on its axis before the drawing is done. The more rotations, the more the mound will ten to flatten out, sending tickets that are at or near the center (especially the latter) away from the center. On the other hand, if there are so few tickets that mounding will not occur, then multiple rotations won’t have much effect on the horizontal placing of the tickets. I’ve seen people scatter their multiple tickets around the inside of the drum, putting some in the center, some to the left, some to the right, but anything other than the center will probably be bad, because the selector will almost always insert his/her hand right in the center or only a bit to the right or left of center; they will never grab from a spot that is far left or far right. And I’m sure that there could be yet other factors to consider that I don’t know about, but a physics expert could discuss.
I’m certain this will be discussed in Part II, but today ‘tickets’ are ‘drawn’ electronically. Those eligible are ‘members’ of the slot club, receive notice to swipe their card at a kioske. Either one symbol (Treasure Chest, Valentine Card, Car, something holiday-related) or four or five of those symbols appear. The player selects one and learns how many ‘chances’ he has for the prize, etc. Similar to how Point or Tier multipliers are awarded.
These have been found to be rigged in the past (in favor of someone important to the organization). I suspect they still are, at least to some degree. JMHO.
And where are these drawings today?
So why are you writing about them?
Uh, Jerry Ice, he isn’t writing about Renoirs or Picassos. The subject is ‘drawings’ for prizes, usually a car.