For a little less than a month now, I’ve been entering the McDonald’s Patriots Fantasy Sweepstakes. I learned about this contest from a lame commercial on T.V. and became interested when I heard that the grand prize was season tickets for next season. Season tickets are, like, impossible to get I hear, so I thought I’d go even further on a limb assuming that if I won the grand prize, I’d have the option to purchase the tickets for subsequent seasons (although in hindsight, I imagine they are property of McDonald’s and are reused for contests every season, or something like that).
What I found really interesting about the contest is how difficult they seemed to make finding the official rules online. If you go to the Patriots official webpage, it’s not right up in front. Honestly, I can’t remember how I stumbled upon the page, but finally I found it here. In reading the official rules, I knew I’d find something like this:
To Enter Without a Purchase: To enter without a purchase, please send a 3” x 5” piece of paper with your name, mailing address, daytime phone number and date of birth hand-printed, affix proper postage and mail to: Redemption Center New England Patriots Promotion ENTRIES, P.O. Box 4823, Oak Brook, IL 60522-4823. Limit three (3) entries per person per day.
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The Sweepstakes drawing will be on or about January 17th, 2005
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To receive an Official Winners List or a copy of the Official Rules, mail a self-addressed stamped envelope (“SASE”) to McDonald’s Redemption Center The McDonald’s “Patriots™ Fantasy” Sweepstakes RULES/WINNERS LIST REQUEST, P.O. Box 3533, Oak Brook, IL 60522-3533 The Winners List is available after 02/07/05.
Just as I assumed — I can enter without having to eat McDonald’s crap or even step foot in their place. I didn’t start looking into this until December 10th, so I already missed out on eight days of entries — no biggie. So from 12/10 - 12/31 = 21 days - 3 Sundays (no mail) - Christmas = 17 * 3 allowed entries per day = 51 entries
In trying to enter this contest, it cost me:
51 * $0.37 stamp = $18.87
Envelopes $0.99 for 80
Index cards = Free (had a ton laying around)
Another bit of info. on the rules page: Contest is eligible only for people in “Eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Southeastern Connecticut, Brattleboro and White River Junction, Vermont, and Kittery, Maine.”
So let’s make some totally unscientific assumptions here. I want to get at least some idea of my odds, so I need to figure out how many people would actually go to the lengths I did. OK, so Gillette Stadium holds 68,000 people. That’s a good number to use I guess. I’ll assume that 68,000 people are entering this contest. I’ll go a step further and assume 10,000 of those people are sending in the maximum number of entries allowed (78). Then I’ll assume that 20,000 of them are going the entry-form route (actually going to a McDonald’s and filling out a form) and mailing that in every eligible day, but I’ll be somewhat realistic and say that they only go to McD’s once a day, so that’s 26 entries there. Then the other 38,000 people I’ll assume enter only once. So in total, that’s 780,000 + 520,000 + 38,000 = 1,338,000 entries. Yikes.
So my odds of winning in the above situation would be about 1 in 26,000. Oof.
Alright, let me got a little more realistic here so I don’t feel too hurt. If they get 10,000 entries my odds are 1 in 196. OK, that I can live with, but I’m not sure how realistic it is.
