I was at a Palms drawing on Friday night in mid-August. Afterwards I stopped by the Gold Coast to play a bit (4x points) and to pick up four beverage packs earned the day before. During “Thursty Thursdays,” 1,200 or more points on Thursday earns you four beverage packs (water, soda, beer) that you can pick up sometime between Friday and the following Wednesday. (You can earn less than four packs. I don’t have the rules with me just now.) I’d played quite a bit more than 1,200 points on Thursday, and if I was going to pick up the beverages, this was a good time.
I parked in Emerald parking, and some friends of mine were parking there at the same time. As we walked in I asked them whether they were picking up water, soda, or beer. “We gave up drinking for Lent,” was the reply from “Sam.”
“Wrong time of the year for that. Besides, you’re Jewish. May I deduce you didn’t play yesterday?”
“Exactly! We were waiting to play until today so we could get 4x points,” Sam told me.
“But yesterday was five times drawing entries! Surely that’s a better deal,” I responded.
“I’ve entered Gold Coast drawings several times and I’ve never won once in my life. Five times zero is still zero. We’ll stick with the 4x points.”
I told Sam he was confusing apples and oranges. He didn’t want to hear about it. He wasn’t in the mood for one of my lectures. So I’ll tell you instead!
Sam has an Emerald card (which means he has played at least 250,000 points in the past six months added up over all of the B Connected casinos) and so he gets 3x points every day where a bigger multiplier isn’t available. I don’t know how much he was planning on playing Friday night, but let’s assume $20,000 coin-in. For some players that’s way more than they would possibly play, but Sam is Emerald and he needs to play $42,000 or more a month just to maintain his Emerald status. Playing $20,000 in one evening would not have been a stretch.
Playing on Friday, Sam would earn 4x points or $80 in cash back. He would also earn 2,000 tickets for any one Saturday night drawing later in the month. Had he played the same $20,000 on Thursday, he would have earned $60 in cash back and 10,000 tickets.
The question is whether the additional 8,000 drawing tickets were worth more or less than $20 in Expected Value. Off the top of my head, the answer is clearly “yes.” Estimating it with precision is elusive.
Let’s say the average win at a Gold Coast drawing is $700. Someone with 2,000 tickets probably has a 5% chance of being called (worth $35 on average) and someone with 10,000 tickets probably has a 20% chance of being called (worth $140 on average). It’s tempting to say that 10,000 tickets means you have five times as much equity as 2,000 tickets, but that neglects the chances of being called twice. Someone who showed up five weeks in a row with 2,000 tickets has a small chance of being called more than once. Someone who shows up once with 10,000 entries has no chance of being called twice because it’s specifically against the rules. If the computer program happens to pick your name twice, it checks your name against those already picked and then discards the second pick if it finds a match.
If you don’t like my estimates of $700 or 5% or 20%, fine. Pick your own. And it is some sort of seat-of-the-pants average over a lot of different situations. Early in the month requires fewer tickets to win because people haven’t had as much time to earn them. Big multiplier days before the drawings mean more tickets in the drum. Big drawings or other event at a competing casino at the same time mean fewer people will activate their tickets that night. Once-a-weekend 10-winners drawings have different requirements than twice-a-weekend 5-winner drawings.
Whatever figures you use, any reasonably accurate estimates will have you figuring out that 5x drawing tickets is worth more than 4x points. At least for Emerald card holders. Sapphire card holders receive 2x points every day and Ruby card holders receive only 1x points on a regular basis. For these players 4x points offers a relatively larger incentive to play on Fridays than it does for someone who earns 3x every day.
If you’re not going to be at the drawings, 5x drawing tickets are worthless to you. It could easily be the case that some other casino (or non-casino, for that matter) was having something of more interest to you than this particular drawing. There are always a plethora of possibilities on how you can spend your time.
You may or may not value the Gold Coast drawings in particular, but attending drawings in general is a necessary evil — at least for me. Being a successful video player is tough today even with supplementing your machine winnings with occasional drawing winnings. Doing it without drawing winnings is a lot tougher. In my 17 years of playing video poker, I’ve had positive scores annually 16 times (i.e. all but 2009). If you take away drawings and tournament results, I’ve had positive annual scores 11 times. These things are a significant part of my business plan. Maybe you can do it differently.
Keep in mind that it’s tough to win drawings at the Gold Coast. They have a lot of players who participate in the drawings and no matter how many tickets you have, there’s a good chance you won’t be called. Everyone who comes in and plays 10 or more points worth a day gets some free tickets on that day, and this dilutes the barrel big time. But they have enough good games that you can play close-to-even until an occasional drawing win takes you into positive territory.
Management at the Gold Coast seems to not want any individual person to win a high percentage of the drawings. It’s not a terrible thing for casino management to want to spread out the winners of their promotions, but this casino seems to pay more attention to that than most others. If you happen to win, it’s probably smart to take the next three months off before trying again. (You can still play in the casino so as to keep earning your mailers, but it’s best to not show up at the drawings if you’ve won recently.) Players who played enough so that they won drawings regularly have had their privileges restricted.
Winning drawings two or three times a year at this casino is probably okay. There is probably no fixed rule as to how much winning constitutes “too much.” At the Palms, the same people regularly get called in their drawings. At the Gold Coast, this would not be tolerated. Which is better? Different players will come to different conclusions, but before you make a concerted effort to win “frequently,” it’s wise to be aware if this is acceptable behavior or not.
(Author’s note: September Thursdays offer 10x entries at Gold Coast — and no free beverages. If you wish to have a chance at the drawings, playing on Thursdays is even more important in September than it was in August.)