Tournies

[dionysus]

It’s fast, it’s fun and it’s free!

That’s right – no entry fee and a guaranteed $10,000 prize pool is waiting for you at the exclusive Lucky Witch Slots Tourney at Ruby Fortune.

10 Cash prizes are up for grabs. All you have to do is log into your casino, then click on the “Lucky Witch 10,000” image and register to play.

Don’t miss out! Beat other players as you compete for the top spot. Rebuys are unlimited and only cost $2,50. So get playing for your prize today!


When I see 'unlimited rebuys', I really wish the header just said 'ATTENTION HIGH-ROLLERS, NO NOT YOU, YOU SAD BROKE-ASS DEPOSITOR, WAIT WHY ARE WE EVEN MAILING YOU, YOU HAVE NO CHANCE IN HELL'

 

[zreb]

Yeah, I have to agree that a lot of these Microgaming slot "freerolls" range from a complete waste of time to outright manipulation of unsuspecting players. The way these work is completely unintuitive to anyone who isn't familiar with them, who might waste a few dollars in continues if they hit a good initial run, and still have just about no realistic chance of beating the small group of people who buy 50 to 999 continues.

Using words like "freeroll" and "promotion" to describe these tournaments, which more often than not result in a profit for the casino, seems outright dishonest to me. But you see it at pretty much all downloadable Microgaming casinos. I'm sure a few people just enjoy letting the slot run for a few minutes and seeing if anything interesting happens with a theoretically possible chance of getting money out of it, and that's fine. But there are also people just throwing away a few dollars here and there, unaware that they cannot possibly win.

Aside from that, there must be some other way to setup these tournaments so that they could be both fair and enjoyable for the average player. For a simple one, just copy the structure of a poker tournament - Set a minimum guaranteed prize pool. Everyone gets one buy-in. Payback 90% of the total buy-ins to the prize pool, casino keeps 10%. Far more transparent and straightforward than the current system. No skill to play in this case, but with a little creativity, more interesting structures can be devised, while still preserving more transparency than the current mess. With the current system, as far as I'm aware, there's no way to actually know how much money in total has been spent on a given tournament (though you can estimate for the top spenders in some of them). I also doubt these are making much money for the casinos compared to other sources, in large part because they just aren't really much fun for most people as they're set up now.

There was a thread on the matter in the promotions section a few day ago here:
Link Outdated / Removed
Overall sentiment seemed pretty negative.

 

[dunover]

That's why on my downloadable MG casinos I only ever played the 'one-shot' tournies either free or paid. Easy to understand and no variables. You play, get the result and that's it. Hope and wait, instead of seeing rivals rebuy time or chips.