Since November the Silverton has been running a "Reel & Win" slot tournament on Tuesdays, open to all of the casino's rewards club members. Players may earn up to two additional entries by earning 100 points each on the day of the tournament, and diamond club members get a second free entry.
This is much like the other low-value tournaments many locals casinos run, often as part of a seniors day. What caught my eye about this one was the total prize money advertised on signs in the casino, on at least one billboard, and in this month's Silverton mailer. The amount in the logo used in the advertising is $10,000.
That's not a huge amount for a slot tournament but it is quite a bit more than usual for an event open to the public. The nearby South Point has a weekly tournament for seniors on Thursdays with a prize pool of just over $5,000, and that's the biggest one I'm aware of.
Another ususual thing I noticed in the advertising for the Silverton's tournament is that the first prize is $1,000, which is a very low percentage of the advertised total. In most gambling tournaments, the first prize is half of somewhere near half of the purse.
This information simmered for a couple of weeks in my brain until this week, when I thought to pick up a rules sheet for the tournament at the players club. The title on the sheet is "Reel & Win Slot Tournament," not "$10,000 Reel & Win Slot Weekly Slot Tournament" as on the advertising logo. The second line of the rules sheet notes that the tournaments have run every Tuesday starting Nov. 6, 2012.
The bottom of the rules sheet gives all the prizes for the tournament. I added them up and got $2,515, not $10,000.
If this were being clearly advertised as a monthly promotion, I wouldn't have a problem with Silverton claiming it's giving away $10,000. But nothing in the advertising or the rules sheet indicates that they are talking about anything other than each weekly tournament.
To figure your equity in any tournament -- the money value of your entries -- you divide the total prize money by the total number of entries. Almost always, the only specific information available before a tournament -- especially one open to the public and not requiring pre-registration -- is the total prize money. You usually have to guess at how many people will show up and how many entries each will have.
Incidentally, whenever I go to any kind of tournament, I try to get as much information as I can about the number of people participating and the total number of entries, so I can better estimate the equity of similar, future tournaments at that casino. Based on this general experience, I would guess the value of an entry to the Silverton's weekly tournament is between one and three dollars. If the prize money were as advertised, those amounts would be four times as much. As I understand the rules, a diamond-level player can get four entries, worth a total of perhaps ten dollars. Still not much, but a lot better than what he's really getting.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment