One popular promotion casinos tend to offer is the notion of a drawing. When you’re at the casino during a drawing, some ruleset determines who is eligible and how many entries you have, and the prizes are awarded on some schedule, such as every hour or half hour. A drawing cycle could have one or more winners.
Some drawings have a redraw feature, where is a player who is drawn doesn’t claim their prize within a set window of time, a redraw will occur to pick a new winner that can claim the prize. This encourages players to continue to play while awaiting word if all the prizes have been awarded.
The thing is, the type of player you are can sometimes matter to the type of drawing happening. Drawings aren’t one size fits all – how you qualify matters, as does how you get entries.
For the purposes of this exercise we’ll divide this into three types of common casino promotional drawings: Play to Earn, Hot Seats and Attend to Enter.
Play to Earn
The first type is likely familiar to many casino players. You play at a casino, and based on your play you earn entries. The most common format is based on how much coin-in you do on slots or your average rated play on table games.
This tends to favor players betting more, because they will hit the threshold to earn another entry more quickly than those who are lower bettors. It certainly doesn’t take them out of the running, but these will be the sorts of promotions where familiar names start to stand out for players who visit casinos enough.
If you’re the type of player who is only likely to earn a few entries, this might be the type to pass on in favor of the other two we’ll mention, because if you’ve got 2 entries and another player has 1,000, just for a simple example, you’ve got a uphill battle to have one of your entries chosen over theirs.
Big cash prize and car giveaways are often structured under this, but casinos will use this format in all sorts of ways.
Hot Seats
This levels the playing field among those who are at the casino because every person actively gambling at the time of the drawing gets an entry for the hot seats – it doesn’t matter how much you’re betting.
So for lower bettors, especially on days/times where the casino may be slower, this can be one of the best scenarios to have a chance to win. The same goes for table game players who may be playing games with a lower house edge than others.
In fact, I won my first ever casino drawing earlier this year during a hot seat giveaway. Playing $3 Blackjack, I won a $3,500 prize in cash from the drawing. This was one of the largest random drawings I had seen all year, and playing when it was on offer clearly worked out.
Attend to Earn
This scenario straddles the line between the two – players must show up during a certain window to drop their entries and have a chance to win. In some cases, each player who attends gets a single entry, more akin to the hot seats but with a bit of an invitational element to it. In others, players can earn multiple entries over a promotional window, but have to come back to drop their entries to be eligible for the prizes.
Generally speaking, you must be present to win; the other two usually have this rule as well, but with Hot Seats it’s predictable the person is there given they use active players as their drawing base. For the play to earn, some people will inevitably leave the property before the drawing, so redraws are not unusual.
The nice thing about this middle ground is only the people who are there for the promotion and drop their entries are eligible, so it can have less participants, and entries, than the Play to Earn. But depending on how the drawings are structured, bigger players may still have an advantage, or may be the only ones eligible to begin with if it’s by invite.
Takeaway
Drawings can look and feel similar on the surface in casino promotions, but knowing how it works can help you decide if it’s a good day to head to the casino and have a chance at an additional prize above/beyond what the machines and tables will have on offer.
