Shares love of sweepstakes at retirement home
You can have a good time, but you won’t beat the tennis pro,” d’Adolf said. “You can spend an hour a day entering sweepstakes and win some nice prizes, but over a long period of time you won’t win a lot of the big prizes. It’s a numbers game, no matter how you look at it. The more entries you have, the more chances you have to win.”
D’Adolf is the unofficial executive director of the National Sweepstakes Convention, an annual conference that last year drew 600 “sweepers” to San Diego. The next convention is slated for July 2021 in Scottsdale. Ariz. D’Adolf said sweepers come from all walks of life, including police officers, post office workers and military service members. Their average age is about 50, he said.
Like most of the older sweepers, d’Adolf got into the contest game through the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, which has awarded cash prizes through magazine entry forms and websites since the late 1960s.
“I got a contest newsletter in 1980 and read the back sheet where people who had been entering sweepstakes published their wins. I thought, ‘ my gosh, this is amazing.’ My friends told me there’s no way to win, so I thought, that’s my challenge.”
D’Adolf ’s career lent itself well to long stretches of downtime that he could fill entering sweepstakes. An electronics engineer, d’Adolf worked in the missile and commercial satellite industries, which took him to all 50 states and many countries overseas. During business f lights, layovers and solo stays at hotels, he had plenty of hours to organize and execute his contest-entry system
With his wife, Pat, and their daughter, April Taylor, d’Adolf moved to Poway in 1982 and retired in 2003. Two years ago, the d’Adolfs sold their home and moved into the Casa de las Campanas retirement community in R.B. As a newcomer, d’Adolf was invited to talk about his career at a Casa residents get-to-know-you event, but it was his sweepstakes hobby that really enthralled the audience. Since then, a handful of residents have taken up sweeping with d’Adolf, who serves as the leader of their informal club.
One of these new Casa sweepers is Dale Douglass, who has spent up to 90 minutes a day entering contests over the past two years. He also attended the convention d’Adolf organized in San Diego last summer. The biggest prize Douglass has won to date is a four-day trip for two to Las Vegas that included a stay at the MGM Grand hotel, Cirque du Soleil show tickets, dinner and round-trip f lights.
“Steve is a very nice guy. He spends a lot of time on this and he wins,” Douglass said. “He calls me up every once in a while and we talk about what we’re doing with entries.”
D’Adolf said the contest game has changed a lot since the dawn of the Internet. Virtually all contests have moved online, eliminating the expense of envelopes and postage stamps, so many more people enter now. The odds of winning a Publishers Clearing House prize now is about 1 in 300 million, so d’Adolf said he no longer bothers with it.
To improve the odds of winning, he recommends entering sweepstakes with limited entry periods and geographic boundaries, like a monthlong contest for only Southern California residents. He also suggests looking for contests that allow you to enter every day, rather than just once, and to look for contests that allow entries by mail, since fewer people will go to the expense. To save time, only enter contests where you really want the prize. And for serious sweeping, subscribe to a paid sweepstakes-oriented website, where editors update the list of contests every day.
D’Adolf also encourages patience. Sweepers shouldn’t expect to win anything until they’ve spent six or more months entering contests every day. They should also be prepared to push through periods of dry spells with no prizes for weeks or months. There are also a few downsides to sweeping. All prizes have to be reported on income taxes. And because each entry requires an email address and often a phone number, d’Adolf said he’s plagued by robocalls and receives at least 5,000 emails a day.
The d’Adolfs favorite prizes are travel-related. Before the pandemic hit, they usually took a free sweepstakes trip about once a month. Some of his favorites were a cruise of the Norwegian coastline, a vodka factory tour in Rotterdam and a brewery tour in Amsterdam. He has also won trips to 15 NASCAR races, the opportunity to throw out the first pitch at a San Diego Padres game, 15 big-screen TVs and dozens of cellphones. Many of these excess gifts he shares with family and his neighbors at Casa, like a free two-hour concert by a mariachi band that peformed for residents on Cinco de Mayo.
Because d’Adolf focuses his time on entering travel sweepstakes, one prize that has always eluded him is a car. They’re not impossible to win, though. A car-loving sweeper who lives in Santee has won more than 20 cars over the years. That win streak has inspired d’Adolf to keep trying.
“I do it for the challenge,” he said. “The value of the prizes is great and I love it, but it’s the challenge of figuring out how to win when other people can’t. It drives me when others say ‘I can’t find a sweepstakes in my hometown.’ I keep looking until I find something. One thing I hear people say is they’re so burned out from entering that they want to take a break for a month. I tell them there’s one thing you can know for sure: You can’t win if you don’t enter.”
pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com