Great Official Lottery 4521159874796
The web is a wonderful thing. You may now do all sorts of things from the comfort of your own home when you used to have to go to a shop or put something in the post.
I now rent my DVDs online and they arrive over the post and I get my weekly groceries delivered to my door having ordered them from Bta my list of favorites online.
The net makes things convenient. So when I forgot to buy my lottery ticket again and missed out on a small prize, I turned to the internet for help. I was surprised at what I found!
There was as I expected the capability to purchase lottery tickets online from the UK's National Lottery website. Great! No longer did I have to fiddle around with cash or get soaked in the rain going to the shop.
In fact they take good care of it all - take the money through your savings account for the subscriptions automatically so that you never miss a draw, check your numbers for you without fail and pay you any winnings!
Paying you your winnings probably will not sound like a big deal - but considering that the UK National Lottery began in 1994, unclaimed prizes have accumulated to more than Ł650 million [$1.17 billion]!
Checking that your numbers have won is probably the most useful service of all - because should you not claim it you do not get it!
A great service - convenient, simple and fun.
Then a few months ago I found the next phase on - an online lottery syndicate system!
Sure - the official national lottery website offers a syndicate management tool - although not like this one.
I looked at it rather sceptically as anyone with the economics degree might! But I went through the numbers to check anyway. I was impressed.
They operate syndicates with 49 members in each. Then they do something clever - they fix among the six numbers in order that each of the 49 numbers is covered and then with 5 other randomly generated numbers they can make 44 separate lines.
This is clever - it implies that you can find 44 entries and effectively the syndicate only has to match 5 of the 6 lottery draw numbers to win the jackpot - since the sixth ball shall always match.
But it is cleverer than that since the syndicate also wins more than the jackpot - another of the 44 lines will win 5 plus the bonus ball and then of-course the additional 42 lines also win by matching 5 numbers! Add all those multiple wins together and divide by the number in the syndicate and you win more than you could have done if you played solo!
In fact your odds of winning increases by 702% in the UK National Lottery Lotto draw!
And they have done the same trick with the EuroMillions draw. In the event you are not knowledgeable about this it is as big as many of the multi-state lotteries in the United States. Why? Because 9 countries in Europe are generally playing it! As well as more want to join in!
It's the biggest tax-free lump-sum national lottery on this planet!
If you were watching the news earlier in 2006 you shall have seen which it rose to an amazing Ł125m rollover (yes - that is in GBP not dollars or euros!)
Being a part on this lottery syndicate increases your prospects of winning by a staggering 3600%! Enhancing the odds of winning any prize to 1 in 10 and it means you can win a prize by matching just one ball!
So next time you are waiting in line to buy your lottery ticket, running the risk of losing it, or forgetting to check whether you've won, think about how the net will make it simpler for you.