13 Oct 2014
Posted by Jeff 
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As you most likely already know, the Monopoly game from McDonald’s is already about half over. You still have about two weeks left to get your hands on some awesome prizes if you’re lucky. McDonald’s boasts a one in four chance to win, which seems like pretty good odds. Well, what are the odds? Let’s take a look at some of the stats to give you an idea on what you are up against:
- For this game, about 602,500,000 game pieces have been printed. Each game piece has two stamps.
- This means there are about 1.2 billion stamps in play. Each stamp is an individual attempt to win, however because you get two, McDonald’s calculates two stamps as one “chance.”
- There are about 135,500,000 food prizes.
- There are about 16,000,000 instant win prizes.
McDonald’s is right that you have about a 25% chance of one of your two game stamps pulling a prize, however about 90% of the time, your prize will be a food prize.
Here is a breakdown of just the food prize odds:
- Quarter Pounder w/Cheese – 2.3% chance
- Small McCafe – 2.3% chance
- McFlurry – 2.3% chance
- Breakfast Sandwich – 4.6% chance
- Medium Fries -11.1% chance
By far, you are likely to win a medium fries if you win anything at all. By the way, medium fries are the least expensive item from the list of food prizes.
The other 10% of the prizes are instant win non-food prizes. These mostly include free Red Box DVD rentals.
Now…let’s look at the properties. Collecting properties is the best part of the game, especially if you are McDonald’s, because it keeps people coming back because they are “so close” to completing a set of colors and winning a “real” prize. As I mentioned in an earlier post, McDonald’s is smarter than to put an equal number of Boardwalk and Park Place properties out there, and make you try to match them up. (Growing up with the game, that seemed possible, but now with the internet and eBay/Craigslist, people will trade pieces).
No, what McDonald’s does is have one piece out of the set be a “rare” gamepiece. If there is only once possible winner of the $1 million by collecting Boardwalk and Park Place, McDonald’s will only print a single boardwalk piece in the entire 1.2 billion stamps, while they will print a virtual endless supply of Park Place stamps.
Here are the real odds for each of the rare game pieces:
- Railroads – Short Line Railroad – Years Supply of Gas – 1 in 150 million.
- Brown – Mediterranean Ave – $1000 prize – 1 in 30 million.
- Light Blue – Vermont Ave – $5000 prize – 1 in 40 million.
- Purple – Virginia Ave – $10,000 prize – 1 in 200 million
- Orange – Tennessee Ave – Super Bowl tickets – 1 in 602 million.
- Red – Kentucky Ave – 40 plane tickets – 1 in 15 million.
- Yellow – Ventnor Ave -$20,000 prize – 1 in 300 million.
- Green – Pennsylvania Ave – Fiat Car – 1 in 40 million.
- Blue – Boardwalk – $1,000,000 prize – 1 in 602 million.
Now knowing the odds, do you think it is really worth it? I know McDonald’s gets a huge bump in traffic from this promotion, however unless you actually just want to buy McDonald’s, and the game pieces are a passing benefit, the famous quote for the movie “WarGames” applies: The only winning move is not to play.
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