You see it's reading about people winning multiple times that makes me very sceptical about how these draws work.
So I'll take a random current competition a Honda Civic Type R. 24995 tickets at £1.99 a pop. This particular site shows the draws and from taking a quick look they always sell out, give or take a few tickets, despite how tempting they must look at 20% sold with mere hours to go.
Lets say I go big and put in the max, £199 for 100 tickets, not an insignificant sum of money. My odds are 100/24995 or, to make things easy, as near as damn it 1 in 250. So the odds to win twice, with the maximum possible stake, is 1 in 62500. Yet everyone has a mate or knows someone who has done it... something doesn't stack up
Anyway... always fancied a Civic Type R as a practical replacement for the MX5 so I'm off for a punt
But you forget the ones you hear about are a very small proportion vs those which play, I'd wager (ironically
) that there have definitely been people who won and sunk all their winnings back into trying to win again with no luck. Not to mention those who spend a lot and have never won which will far outweigh winners. Additionally the psychological thing of once you've won you know it's possible and pushes you to keep trying, especially if you've just won a chunk of money with which to do it...I'm fortunate enough to be one of the multiple winners but I'll openly admit whilst I'm up vs what I've spent it's definitely not by as much as you might think, definitely only single digit multiples up vs my spend. And for myself, I know of many that have spent I assume thousands by now and not won a dime back.
FWIW; Most of the big competition websites run at ~60% prize value vs total ticket sales, assuming all sold which often they don't.
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