Phil Gordon went to a charity event for the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation and did a little gambling:
They had a raffle for some brilliant prizes, and being the sorta guy I am, I decided to take a shot. Raffle tickets were selling for $25 a piece until you go to the $500 donation level when they went for $20 a piece. At a $1000 level, you get 100 tickets ($10 a ticket). Everyone seemed to be buying $25 tickets, so I thought what the hell, lets make a nice sizable donation…. I bought $2000 worth and got 200 tickets in exchange. Then, I found out that I bought them from the “wrong girl” and that there was a contest going on whereby the girl with the most tickets sold got a prize. So, I ended up buying another $2000 in tickets. $4000 in tickets purchased in all. By my calculations, I had about 1/3 of the tickets in play.
To make a long story short, I won the top two prizes:
Two round trip tickets to Sydney on Qantas in the “sleeper” seats plus 6 nights at the Sydney Harbor Marriott. $25k value.
and…
Two round trip business class tickets to anywhere in Europe courtesy of American Airlines. $18k value.
$43,000 for $4000. Not bad. My girlfriend was extremely happy as well, as you might imagine.
So if he had 1/3 of the tickets in play, and we assume the other 2/3 were purchased at $25 per ticket, he contributed 20% of the donation pool for a 33% chance of winning at least one prize and ended up with an ROI of 1075%. Not bad.
Read more at his MySpace blog.
