In a recent article I shared some of the pros and cons of hot seats vs. casino drawings. Let’s take a look at another form of promotion: Casino tournaments.
The most common one players will see are slot tournaments, but there can also be others: Blackjack, Video Poker, etc.
The common throughput is you get a certain amount of currency to attempt to get yourself on a scoreboard. The players who achieve the prize-winning levels (not necessarily the top positions, which we’ll discuss in a second), qualify for a prize.
Here’s a few things to evaluate to determine whether this makes sense for you to participate.
What is the Cost?
Many casinos offer free tournaments as a lure to bring in players. If this is the case, this can be a fun few minutes of slapping a slot button or attempting to build a pile of chips for a chance to win what often amounts to a free play prize.
Some tournaments have a fee. This can still be worthwhile if there’s a guaranteed prize for all participants, or the odds of winning in terms of the number of places and number of players eligible can make it worth your while, but would generally have a higher barrier of entry.
How Many Participants vs. How Many Prizes?
Most tournaments are time limited and have a certain number of players per session, so that will place an upper limit on how many participants can join in within the time available. In certain cases, like slot tournaments, slots may go unclaimed because there aren’t enough players to fill a timeslot, but that time slot will go on as scheduled.
So your math will be the worst case scenario. If there’s 20 machines that have a session per 10 minutes, that works out to 120 potential participants per hour, but may be less than that.
Then, you want to look at how many prizes are on offer, and consider the odds of winning a prize. If you are taking a dedicated trip to a casino for a tournament opportunity in lieu of other offers, see if that value aligns with what you might claim on another visit.
For table game tournaments, it’s also worth confirming if the chips are play until you lose chips, or one-time use chips. The latter has a lower expected value since you’re going to lose a percentage of your wagers, meaning your value to you as a player won’t be 1:1.
Can You Buy In Again?
Another scenario that can change the makeup of how many participants there are is the concept of whether you can buy in for another round. Usually, your highest score survives in a scenario like this, but it prunes the number of unique people eligible to win a prize. That, combined with empty seats, can make a difference. If a tournament is regularly occurring, you can see how this goes down to get a feel for it.
Who Wins a Prize?
Slot tournaments in particular can sometimes have fun and unusual structures beyond just are you a top scorer, which can keep players in suspense until the final round is over. For instance, they can award random spots prizes, like 50th or 100th place. Casinos will do this to encourage players to stick around until the end, but it also takes the pressure off absolutely having to rank in the top few spots.
When participating in one of Carnival’s million dollar slot tournaments, they did award prizes to the top 100, but some bigger prizes were scattered about adding some suspense to what you’d win if you were more in the middle of the pack of prize winners.
Combining All These Into an Example
For the last few months I’ve been participating in a weekly Blackjack tournament at my local casino. It has 24 sessions with 5 seats per table, meaning 120 people. The first round is free, but if spaces are available you can buy in up to two more times. The top ten players win a chip prize, meaning 10/120 if there’s 120 unique players. There’s not with the buy-ins.
So far I’ve won a prize twice, in the form of one-time use chips. The amount one has worked out well against what I would get on other casino visits for offers; in fact, a slot play bonus (in the form of a scratch catch you present each visit) adds additional value to coming on that night. So for me, the chance of winning additional bonus table games free play on a night I can already claim slot free play gives me a good reason to go down and try my luck.
In this case the prize ladder was pretty traditional going from 1st to 10th, so if I bombed out or didn’t make the leaderboard, and didn’t or wasn’t interested in buying in for another round, I was able to bail pretty quickly if I chose to do so. One nice touch is they also gave players 24 hours to claim their prize, so you could come back the next day if you had a good shot of placing, but needed to get home.
By comparison, they also offer a slot tournament, but the combination of more sessions and more seats, but the same number of winners, reduces the chances of getting something out of it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to attend it, but if I was already going to go for other reasons, I’ll sometimes throw my hat in the ring for a round of button mashing.
