I don't know E's contest seemed a bit contrived, and as everyone said, you really needed to drop some coin to better your chances.........as slight as that may have been.
Now T11's contest on the other hand, while I know there was some complaining, the contest did give something back to ALL of their customers at NO CHARGE! Like it or not, people walked away with points and prizes without having to spend a dime. Some won with a lucky spin, others were able to accumulate enough points to buy something. But again....without having to spend anything, in my eyes that seems much more like a "Thank You for being our customers, whether you purchase a deck or a brick"
They gained my respect and support.
This is from the contest rules, in the section on Competition Entries - I added the bold to the text:
7. All Holiday Giveaway Entry Tickets are placed into orders at random. ellusionist® staff do not have any control over the tickets placed in each order. Only 1 ticket will be placed into each order for every $50 spent in the cart, excluding Gift Certificates. The cart will display the number of tickets to be placed in your package, prior to purchase.
Does three consecutive ticket numbers sound like a lot less than random selection to you?
And now the "free entry" rule, as is required for all such contests taking place in California:
11. In complying with California State Law, ellusionist recognises the ability for entries to be made into the competition without purchase. To receive your free ticket, please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to "Holiday Giveaway Free Entry, Ellusionist.com, 553 Martin Ave Unit C, Rohnert Park, CA 94928.So sure you could - and still can - get tickets for the contest. You just need to shell out an envelope and two stamps. There's no indication of a limit on how many times one can enter, but when you figure that 100 entries will cost around $100 including the cost of the envelopes, there's a theoretical limit as to how many entries your wallet can make.
"Hey, what about that 'and still can' statement? Isn't the holiday contest over?"
Not according to this rule from the same section:
1. The Competition is valid from 19 November 2013 to 14 February, 2014.These two rules I just mentioned would seem to be a contradiction of what this rule states, in the Qualifying Entrants section:
1. The Contest is open to all customers of ellusionist® who make a qualifying purchase (any purchase containing a shippable item, made between November 18, 2013 and midnight on December 31, 2013. Entrants under the age of eighteen (18) years old must seek parental and/or guardian consent before participating in the promotion.But there's still no mention of when people can no longer request free entries, and the contest is still listed quite clearly as ending on Valentine's Day.
This rule is quite interesting, taken from the Prizes section:
3. All winners of the competition will be announced on facebook.com/ellusionist and in a prize notification blog post at blog.ellusionist.com no later than February 28, 2014 - excepting those prizes that remain unclaimed. Additionally, notification emails will be sent within 7 days following the closing of the promotion for any prizes that remain unshipped. ellusionist® reserves the right to deal with all unclaimed prizes in any manner deemed fit.So, they might have a second chance contest. Or they might keep the goodies for themselves. Or they might burn them in an offering to the Yak God, Bahphotet. Like the bottle says, "Anything is Possible!"
So, what are the real odds of getting a prize? Who knows? They don't even know, according to this rule from the same section:
4. Prize odds for the contest are conditional on the number of entries received/given during the promotion period and can therefore not be accurately published. Odds for winning any one prize are equal. Maximum odds for winning any prize should not at any point exceed 1 in 50,000 chance based on forecast of ticket supply. Should more than 50,000 tickets require to be issued before the end of the competition period, additional prizes will be added to maintain odds. Total prize pool value (non-inclusive of free gifts) is approximately $15,610.00 recommended retail value. So your odds can't possibly be worse than 50,000:1 - unless of course, they never bothered to include tickets from your range in the drawing. I would think it would be a statistical impossibility that my three "randomly-assigned" tickets would be three consecutive numbers. Assuming that distribution was genuinely random, the odds of that occurring are:
50,000:49,998 that I'd get any one random ticket other than the last two.
49,999:1 that I'd get the next consecutive ticket.
49,998:1 that I'd get the next consecutive ticket after that one.
Total odds: 2,499,750,007.99992:1 - in plainer terms, nearly 2.5 billion to one. I would have a better chance of winning any of the long-shot, multi-state lottery drawings in the US today. Oh, miracle of miracles, I might be the luckiest man on the planet to have randomly received three numbers in a row out of a pool of 50,000...
Now of course, this does assume 50,000 tickets were issued. Since it appears that there were no tickets below 10,000, let's assume that ticket 10,001 was the first ticket and my three tickets were the last three issued. Certainly, that would be the best my odds could possibly have been. With the "last ticket" being 21,247, this means that 11,247 tickets were issued. This would be the best possible odds scenario. So that gives us:
11,247:11,245 that I'd get any ticket other than the last two.
11,246:1 that I'd get the next consecutive ticket.
11,245:1 that I'd get the next one after that.
Total "best case scenario" odds: 126,438,781.9996443:1 To give you an idea of how nigh-impossible that is, the New York State Lottery website (nylottery.org) gives the odds for winning their top-prize games most recently drawn as follows:
Lotto - 6 numbers out of 59 - 22,528,737 to 1 based on a minimum $1 play (two games). For any one game played, the odds get cut in half to 45,057,474 to 1.
Powerball - 5 numbers out of 59 and 1 number out of 35 - 175,223,510 to 1.
Mega Millions - 5 numbers out of 75 and 1 number out of 15 - 258,890,850 to 1.
So the odds of my occurrence are only about twice as good as winning the Mega Millions and about 1.4 times as good as winning the Powerball, the odds of winning the Lotto are six times EASIER than the odds of me drawing three consecutive numbers under best case scenario conditions in Ellusionist's "contest".
Boiling it down to brass tacks, I allege that E lied through their teeth about the actual randomness of the ticket distribution as well as the randomness of the drawing and that the entire "competition" was a huge fail from day one. At least the poker hand contest from last year was kind of fun and it got people here teaming up to see what the key ticket needed was for each prize tier.
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