COVER STORY : Playing to Win : For some lucky ones who are persistent and know the tricks of the game, it’s no contest.
For years, Steve Ledoux received those pesky sweepstakes entries in the mail at his Studio City apartment. He’d sort through them--the ones with promises of big prizes or exotic trips, the ones with Ed McMahon’s face on the envelopes--and he’d sometimes mail them in.
He never won a thing.
But two years ago, he met Janis Cowser, then of North Hollywood, who was already a fanatic about entering contests. She has won trips to Switzerland, the West Indies, Aspen and Hawaii, where she hit the jackpot and met the man she plans to spend the rest of her life with.
Cowser, 41, has moved to Hawaii and planned to marry James Sidney Horner, 51, on Valentine’s Day. She thanks her penchant for sweepstakes for her present happiness but is delaying the honeymoon--until the couple wins a trip for two in a sweepstakes contest.
“People think we’re luckier than the next guy, but it’s really not true,” says Ledoux, an electronic graphic artist for NBC Studios. “But there are a few things I’ve learned from Janis that I believe have helped me.”
That could be an understatement.
Ledoux, 34, has amassed a roomful of prizes including a Macintosh computer and printer, three 19-inch color televisions, a bread maker, an outdoor grill, a Fuji camera, kitchen appliances, stacks of compact discs, sunglasses and T-shirts, vitamins, long-distance telephone service, a dental examination for his dog and more.
In the next year, he’ll have to find time to trek to Puerto Rico, Maui, Florida and Oakland. He has seen Cirque du Soleil, Ringling Brothers Circus, the rock band War at the House of Blues and the musical “Tommy” at the Universal Amphitheatre--all for free.
He won $300 for two “ridiculous” chicken recipes that he concocted. He’s not sure what to do with the Swiss hiking boots, winter gloves, Rollerblades, watches and ice coolers he may never use.
“People might think I’ve become a little obsessed about this hobby of mine, but I like winning,” says Ledoux with a smile.
In a little more than a year, he’s collected about $12,000 worth of cash and prizes--not counting $18,500 he previously won on three game shows. All that, he says, for about three hours of work and $25 in postage a week.
Ledoux, Cowser and a growing number of upper-middle-class suburban dwellers are taking those mail-in contests seriously and becoming self-professed “sweepstakes-aholics.” Sweepstakes entries have developed into hobbies, much like stamp collecting, and people are trading information, tricks and success stories.
The Contest News-Letter, published in Danbury, Conn., has mailing lists predominantly in large suburban areas like the San Fernando Valley. Contestants have a median income of $38,000, says Rich Henderson, editor of the 300,000-circulation newsletter.
“There’s an emotional lift dreaming about the winnings that I think is good for you,” says Henderson, who has won a key chain, T-shirt, kitchen magnet and a video camcorder, but still hopes for a big prize. “We get letters from people who say they’ve won the first contest they entered, but it’s all the luck of the draw.”
Computer Internet links like America Online have “rooms” where people discuss the hottest contests to enter, and that’s where Brian Gusse of Van Nuys searches for contests. A production worker in a publishing company, Gusse has entered contests for 13 years but only last year became a big winner.
“It seemed to happen all at once,” Gusse says. “I started winning little things, T-shirts and stuff, then I won $2,000 in cash and then a 1948 Ford customized car appraised at $35,000.”
Gusse sold the car for $22,000 and credits his streak simply to luck. Other hard-core entrants say they have ways to hedge their bets. They get writer’s cramp as they spend hours filling out their names on index cards and drive for miles to drop off ballots for a prize they may never win. Ledoux, for example, drove more than 100 miles one recent weekend in a contest quest that took him to a dozen Alpha Beta grocery stores across the Valley and Simi Valley. He filled out more than 1,000 ballots. One clerk saw him stuffing ballots and called him a “cheater.”
Then, the results came in: a $100 gift certificate from one store, a television from another store, another television, a third television and, finally, the grand prize, a $4,000 trip to Puerto Rico.
“He didn’t break any rules,” says Celvin West, the Granada Hills Alpha Beta manager who pulled Ledoux’s name and gave him a $250 television.
In the case of Alpha Beta, as in most contests, store managers don’t compare winners’ names, and multiple winnings are not against the rules. If the name is pulled from the box, then that’s the name that wins. And, in recent years, stores like Alpha Beta are doing two or three promotional contests a year.
Lenore D’Medici, 50, of Valencia is particular about the contests she enters. Because she is on many mailing lists for contests, she receives “a truckload of sweepstakes each week, but I don’t enter most of them because I haven’t just fallen off the turnip truck.”
She enters only about 10% of the contests that come to her mailbox. D’Medici avoids the contests that ask for a processing fee or require a 900 call.
“If it doesn’t cost anything, then it’s safe, but if they ask for money, then it’s an automatic toss,” D’Medici says.
D’Medici has entered contests at local stores and through the mail for more than a decade with moderate success--she’s won a few trips--but she’s playing state lottery scratchers, buying tickets in the Australian lottery and playing poker in Las Vegas and Gardena in anticipation of a big win.
“I guess you have to keep this hobby in check or else it could get a bit out of hand,” D’Medici says.
Valley representatives of Gamblers Anonymous say entering contests could lead to obsessive behavior that might result in someone overextending his income as well as his time. But Harriet Simon of Encino, who runs the Family Support Group for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, says she’s never heard of a compulsion evolving from entering contests.
“It sounds like a pretty innocent thing,” Simon says.
Perhaps, but it’s also infectious. When Ledoux told his friend, Harry Pruet of Studio City, about his prizes, Pruet started entering contests, but only those offering prizes of more than $50,000 cash.
“After Steve won three TVs in one afternoon, I knew it was possible to win these prizes, so I enter in my spare time, but I’m going for the big ones only,” says Pruet, whose mother won a $3,500 cruise with only one entry. “Some people have a Midas touch.”
Once he began winning, Ledoux says, he wanted to keep winning, so he tried for key chains, roasted turkeys, concert tickets--anything.
A retired friend and neighbor, Robert Galbraith, 62, says Ledoux’s luck rubbed off, and Galbraith has won a few grocery gift certificates and a free airline trip--to Oakland.
“I have never been on a plane before, I’m not crazy about heights, and I don’t really care to go to Oakland, but I’m taking the trip,” Galbraith says. “And I’m taking Steve so nothing will happen to the plane.”
Galbraith spends some of his spare time filling out contest ballots now, and, he figures, “If you can win $10 million for the cost of a postage stamp, why not?”
Sometimes, Ledoux finds himself winning prizes he doesn’t want. He gave up trying to use the Rollerblades, he’s not interested in some of the styles of music he now owns, and he finds himself entering contests for such prizes as a trip to the Super Bowl when he doesn’t even know what teams are competing.
“I do it for the excitement of winning, that’s the fun of it,” says Ledoux, who flooded ballot boxes last month at 14 Vons markets for a trip to London. “You find yourself doing strange things for some of the contests, but I won’t drive all the way to Orange County to enter ballots. I’m not that addicted.”
He did, however, create two recipes for a Wesson Oil contest that won him $300 in cash. Ledoux doesn’t cook--at least not well--and he created Caribbean Sweet ‘N’ Sour Fried Chicken with lots of pepper, pineapple juice, brown sugar and oil and Cracklin’ Double Nut Fried Chicken with smooth peanut butter, milk, crushed red pepper flakes, coconut, dry mustard and oil.
“I never successfully cooked these. I burned ‘em twice, but I think I won because I put the ‘Wesson Oil’ in big bold letters on the recipe,” Ledoux muses.
Sitting at his desk with his sweepstakes kit--supplies of postcards, colored pens, stickers, stamps and entries, Ledoux reveals a few of his secrets. He uses brightly colored and larger-than-normal envelopes if the rules don’t spell out a preference. That way, he figures, when the entries are dumped into a bag, his ballot may be more likely to be picked. He sticks pictures of animals (no snakes, he warns, because people fear snakes) on the envelopes and writes lucky messages and sayings.
Stickers and brightly colored envelopes aren’t recommended by Contest News-Letter editor Henderson, who said the money should go instead to stamps. “There’s really no way to know if decorations help, but we do know that the post office doesn’t like stickers that may detach,” Henderson says.
Contest officials, such as Sally King, of Schaumburg, Ill., say brightly colored, larger envelopes don’t help a contestant win, although multiple numbers of entries can. (Last summer, she awarded Cowser the two-week Hawaii trip worth $12,796 in the Spot the Energizer Bunny and Win Cool Trips to Hot Places contest.)
“Another thing I taught Steve to do is to meditate and visualize the prize while you are filling out the ballot,” Cowser says. “I did that for the Hawaii trip, but I never thought I’d win a man out of it too.”
Cowser says she was lonely and jobless before she won the Hawaii trip and met her future husband, who works for Hilton Hotels in Waikoloa. She stumbled into her sweepstakes hobby while working at the Los Angeles County Probation Department in Juvenile Hall. She saw a youth filling out 3-by-5 cards for his mother.
“Those things don’t work,” Cowser recalls telling the teen-ager. “Your mother is Spanish, and I’m black, and we don’t win those things.”
“You’re wrong,” answered the youth, who recited a long list of the prizes his mother had won.
Cowser began entering contests when she had time during her 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift. She won trips to Grenada, Lake Tahoe and other places. She insists she visualized all her prizes before she won.
She also writes cheery messages like “Good things are always happening” on the outside of her envelopes, just in case that makes a difference to the person pulling out the ballots.
“If anything, I hope it makes someone smile who’s handling the letter,” she says.
Now, she’s using her tactics to try to win a honeymoon to Paris.
Ledoux suggests now is the best time to enter contests because fewer people are entering because of the recent increase in postal rates.
“It should be something you enjoy doing and brag about,” Ledoux says. “I certainly do.”
Sweepstakes wins are taking him to nightclubs, restaurants and parts of the world he would never otherwise visit, and he is donating extra items (like one of his televisions) to charities. He has spent more than $150 in postage for certain contests--and sometimes doesn’t win.
When he does win, it’s worth it. The doggie cape he won for April, his West Highland white terrier, arrived just in time for one of the recent rainstorms.
“You just never know about the sweepstakes,” says Ledoux, who is working on winning a sweepstakes for a European cruise, sponsored by a laxative company. “If you throw away those things you get in the mail, you could be throwing away money. And like they say, ‘If you don’t enter, you can’t win!’ ”
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Hints for Hitting the Jackpot
A few tips suggested by local sweepstakes and contest enthusiasts:
* Set aside an area specifically for this hobby.
* Enter the most obscure and least-known contests.
* Watch for contests in stores and malls.
* Look in newspapers and magazines for ballots.
* Read the fine print for all the rules.
* Enter as many times as you can.
* Write neatly and legibly.
* Use self-adhesive stamps or a blotter to avoid too much licking.
* Stagger entries over time (a few entries each week).
* If only one entry is allowed per household, use friends’ addresses (but let them know in case they’re called).
* Use colored envelopes.
* Write positive, happy sayings on the envelope.
* Fill ballots out by hand, not with pre-addressed labels.
* Be aware that taxes must be paid on big prizes.
* Make sure your No. 10 envelope (if a contest specifies that) is 4 1/8 by 9 1/2 inches, not 4 1/2 by 9 1/2 inches.
* Subscribe to the Contest News-Letter Deluxe, P.O. Box 3618, Danbury, CT 06813, for contest listings. $25.97 for 24 issues a year or $15 for 12 issues a year.