How to tell if a competition has good odds, or is good value?
Comparing different competitions and the value they provide can be borderline impossible, as they all have different odds, different prices, different amount of sold tickets, and different ways of doing the raffles some of which are more genuine than others… So, how to tell which competition is good value, and which one isn’t?
In this post I’ll try to do just that for a handful of competitions that seem to be doing well or at least be popular enough. At the time of putting these numbers together, I chose all popular competitions I could easily find that had jackpots in excess of £70,000 which I deem to be more than enough to be a life-changing amount of money (as in, either the cash prize itself was worth this or the cash alternative was worth this).
The competitions included in this comparison & figures used in the calculations
- Rev Comps (£12.97 ticket / 9999 tickets / £70,000 prize)
- 7Days Performance (£0.50 ticket / 699,999 tickets / £170,000 prize)
- Dream Car Giveaways (£0.79 ticket / 419,995 tickets / £160,000 prize)
- Pristine Competitions (£4.99 ticket / 74,999 tickets / £100,000 prize)
- Elite Competitions (*£0.99 ticket / 499,999 tickets / £150,000 prize)
- Bear Competitions (£19.99 ticket / 7,999 tickets / £75,000 prize)
- Click Competitions (£0.89 ticket / 264,995 tickets / £100,000 prize)
* = Elite Competition had the tickets for £0.99 as they were doing some kind of a discount. It looked like these are just non-stop promotional discounts, so to be kind to them I used this ticket amount (rather than the full ticket price of £1.39) – but even with this lower ticket price they compare very poorly in the below calculations!
Please note, that these figures aren’t super-scientific, and this represents only one moment in time when these competitions had specific jackpots available. And as these prizes change all the time, they’re never apples to apples or even apples to oranges. More like; bananas to pneumatic drills. That being said; one thing I have noticed is that the competitions typically calculate the amount of tickets / ticket prices / amount of return on their investment very similarly between draws, so even though competitions will and can change… Most of the time they don’t seem to!
The easiest way to compare the competitions – ROI (Return on Investment)
The first way of comparing the competitions and gauging the perceived value would be to just simply compare what the jackpots are worth, and what the total amount of money the competition is trying to raise is. I’ve purposefully ignored ‘total prize pots’ or secondary prizes – because realistically who gives a toss if you have a 1-in-2 chance of winning a bag of crisps. I surely don’t. Please find the below multipliers for how much money the company is trying to raise (lower is better).
The calculation was simply done by multiplying the amount of available tickets by the full price cost of the tickets, and then this figure being divided by the jackpot / cash alternative. A figure of 1 therefore would just mean that the competition sells exactly the amount that they’re also giving away (which wouldn’t be good business).
- Rev Comps – 1.85 x ROI
- 7Days Performance – 2.06 x ROI
- Dream Car Giveaways – 2.07 x ROI
- Bear Competitions – 2.13 x ROI
- Click Competitions – 2.36 x ROI
- Elite Competitions – *3.29 x ROI
- Pristine Competitions – 3.74 x ROI
* = with the full ticket price this would have been 4.63 x!
Rev Comps was the clear winner here in terms of how the company isn’t trying to raise a ridiculous amount of money with the prize, followed by 7Days Performance. I was expecting there to be a bit of variance, but it is quite wild to notice that competitions like Pristine Competitions and Elite Competitions try to raise twice as much or more than their competition. I suspect some of these more popular and better competitions are able to work with a lower ROI (which is better for customers) because they don’t need to advertise as heavily and therefore their operating costs are also a lot lower.
Odds between the competitions
Now, this is where it gets a bit more complicated. Obviously, if you spend £10 on one ticket on Rev Comps, and 10p on one in 7Days Performance – the odds of winning cannot and shouldn’t be anywhere near one another for one ticket. This is why looking solely at the amount of available tickets is not always helpful, and you need to take the cost of the ticket into consideration. (Although it can be, especially if you can find competitions that are undersold and the odds are a lot better because of that as well!)
Adjusted odds – £10 spent on tickets
This is why I thought I’d calculate the odds of winning each competition… If you were to spend £10 on tickets. This obviously is impossible in practice and assumes you are able to purchase partial tickets, but for the sake of comparison this should be somewhat helpful. Please see the results below for what your odds would be if you spent exactly £10 on the competition (higher is better).
- Rev Comps – 0.0077%
- Bear Competitions – 0.0063%
- Click Competitions – 0.0042%
- Dream Car Giveaways – 0.0029%
- 7Days Performance – 0.0028%
- Pristine Competitions – 0.0027%
- Elite Competitions – 0.0020%
But of course, just looking at the above odds isn’t necessarily helpful – as these are just the odds of winning the jackpot with the £10 spend. But as there is quite a big difference between the different prizes and the jackpots that you can actually win (e.g. with Rev Comps it was £70,000 and with 7Days Performance it was £170,000), there needs to be a second round of adjustments to take this into account.
Adjusted odds – £100,000 prize
Therefore, I adjusted the above odds with a multiplier that would take the jackpot up or down to £100,000. The below therefore are the best ‘adjusted odds’ that I could come up with myself, that made some common sense to me as it’s adjusted by spending a similar amount on each competition, and for the same prize amount.
- Rev Comps – 0.0054%
- 7Days Performance – 0.0048%
- Bear Competitions – 0.0047%
- Dream Car Giveaways – 0.0046%
- Click Competitions – 0.0042%
- Elite Competitions – 0.0030%
- Pristine Competitions – 0.0027%
Conclusion
Once adjusted for the amount of money spent and the sum you are able to win, the differences between the top 5 competitions seem to be very negligible in terms of the value provided. In this regard, it does have to be pointed out that both Elite and Pristine Competitions appear to be very poor value – and not worth giving a go unless you can catch a draw that is extremely heavily undersold (but even then it’s not always recommended as the competitions with undersold draws tend to go under, so even if you win you may not receive your prize).
But as for the others, because the odds and value appear to be very similar: It’s probably more important that you choose a competition that is recommended due to its good business practices and the way they run the competition and draws – rather than a calculated difference of 0.0001% in odds.
If you wish to compare the value between two competitions, you can always calculate the ROI the competition is trying to achieve with the below formula, and the higher the number, the greedier the competition is. Currently the top competitions are around 1.80 – 2.10 x ROI. If you get anything above 2.5 or even in excess of 3.0… Just walk away; as that’s just a solid indication that the competition is more focused on making a profit, than trying to reward its players.
[ (Amount of tickets available) x ( Cost of a ticket ) ] / (Jackpot Value)
And finally, as it looks like the adjusted odds and which competitions came out on top seem to be very similar to just calculating the ROI and level of generosity / greediness by the competition… I would just do that if you wish to compare competitions by yourself, rather than spending too much time on the actual odds.
– T
