I’m doing a raffle draw for my wedding, we have about 10 prizes. Should I limit it to one prize per person or is it better to just hand out prizes to whatever ticket is drawn? (so some people may win more than once)

7 comments

1. You keep the ticket that was drawn out of future drawing.

2. Wait, you are giving away prizes at your wedding?

3. Are people buying tickets? If so you can’t really restrict them to one prize per person.

4. pick the option that you would want it to be if you were the person who won a second time.

   >!it probably kinda sucks to win something and then know for a fact you’re done winning for the day, and the rules don’t change the odds enough to be impactful IMO. may as well replace the raffle with drawing names from a hat tbh!<

   actually, there’s a correct answer here. you get as many chances to win as raffle tickets you have

5. All tickets are valid, but only 1 prize per person. If someone’s ticket gets drawn and they already have a prize, they can choose to exchange their prize for the one being offered. Then another ticket is drawn to see who wins the current prize or the exchanged prize.

6. Oh! My family contains several professional gamblers, two renowned gambling academics (yes that exists), and many veteran recreational gamblers. We’ve put craps and blackjack tables in a field next to the food trucks. Here’s a way-too-long answer that I promise only took me five minutes to type because I’ve been preparing for this even though I didn’t know it. I do not expect anyone but OP to read all of this, and bro if you don’t make it through this novel I don’t blame you.

   First off, everyone is there to celebrate you and your partner and have a blast. If you emphasize the rules at the point of ticket purchase, hopefully everyone will be mature and you’d be fine going for maximum distribution of prizes. But hey, people have been known to drink at weddings, family is family, and even unvocalized feelings of having been ripped-off are a bummer.

   To restate the problem:

   It’s a fun-killer when one whale takes home all the booty, but with raffles you want to be careful disincentivising the buyers of multiple tickets. In general with raffles, most people buy none and then some people buy ten. You’re probably not focused on ticket revenue, but also higher anticipated ticket revenue allows you to spend more on prizes, which in turn makes it more fun.

   My uncles would be disappointed in me if I did not suggest some creative solutions, so here:

   A grand prize drawing. You have a separate drawing for the grand prize composed of only the other prize winners, all equally weighted. In that scenario, I think you can limit it to one regular prize per person because the additional raffle tickets still bought them a greater chance to be in the grand prize drawing. There are still downsides. You then have to weight 30-50% of your total prize value toward that grand-prize, and it inevitably goes to someone who has already won. Upside is that it increases the likelihood of someone winning the grand prize off a single ticket because it flattens the GP odds for multiple-ticket buyers even as it rewards them with an equally-weighted increase to their chance of GP drawing entry.

   Other bells & whistles:

   –Make the purchaser of the ticket and the beneficiary of the ticket two separate lines. You can purchase as many tickets as you want, but each guest can only be the beneficiary of one ticket. That way you get people buying tickets for spouses and parents and nephews etc. That negates the need to limit the prizes on the other end or warn anyone, because they’ve already had to select a unique beneficiary for each ticket.

   –This has nothing to do with odds or fairness, but it might be really fun to go white elephant. The later winners can trade with any earlier winner for the non-grand prizes. All regular winners are entered into the grand prize drawing. If you go white elephant then there is entertainment for everyone instead of just the potential winners. That said, white elephant can get tough with actually-desirable prizes. You know your group.

   –You can make the grand prize drawing more fun by doing a runner-up drawing right before it that re-enters every raffle ticket and draws from that. Then everyone is back in and paying attention, which lessons the feeling of watching a winner win. Downside is further value-dilution of the bottom-tier prizes.

   Woo! OP I bet you’re ready to make it really simple or scrap it altogether if you made it through this novella! Blame my uncles.

7. One prize per person let’s more people have fun and it’s not like your wife is going to throw out multiple veils. If you have a really small wedding you cannot have 2 or 3 people win everything and everyone else gets nothing.