[NewGuy]

Havana,

A lot of people appreciate the effort. Your analysis seems solid and I agree with most of your assumptions. I do think that the amount of pubilicity this message gets is just as if not more important than the message content itself (e.g., the possibility of a published letter in Card Player actually has some chance of influencing decision makers at Party, emails to Party customer service not so much).

Here are some suggestions, feel free to ignore or use them.

1) $5 Million seed money
[ QUOTE ]

The promotion had run for 9 weeks out of a total of 32 weeks, so the fair share of that $5 million to distribute to the players would be 9/32*5,000,000 =$1,406250 making the correct prize pool $10,690,676.


[/ QUOTE ]

I think adding this calculation of the "pro-rated" portion of the $5 Million that would be "fair" to pay players clouds your argument and analysis a bit. It's a bit confusing, and I'm actually not sure I or others would agree with the logic. It also only boosts the "Party shorted" tally by ~10%.

One suggestion:
Make your argument & calculations conservative by leaving all $5 Million out. Show the "minimum" seat value with it out, then maybe show the "fair" seat value with the full $5Million in.

2) # of Weekly seats
While I agree your estimate is conservative, this whole argument would be more powerful if we actually KNEW how many weekly seats there were. This may not be possible, but it would help the argument considerably. I've asked via the phone and email and gotten stonewalled, but if we can find out it would help.

3) # of Monthly/Weekly seats with reduced value
Good catch on the value of Monthly/Weekly seats being lower for Grand Final seat holders.

Just my opinion, but I think there are considerably more than 600 Weekly seats and 600 Monthly seats held by people who already won a Grand Final seat. If I'm thinking this through properly, your using a low # of 600 UNDERSTATES the Grand Final seat final which is OK. I suppose we could make a very unscientific poll to get a better estimate of avg # of Monthly / Weekly seats Grand Final seat winners held (I had 5 and 2, respectively).

4) Add an executive summary?
Maybe a quick blurb at beginning or end showing estimated seat #s & paouts actually paid vs. fair.
If not a summary, maybe just add to the bottom of your analysis a "check" that calculates the total payout of your "fair" seat values to show it tallies up correctly with the $14.4Million + weekly/monthly payouts.

Thanks for the effort.