At some point in his/her life, every person would hope of striking it rich. So when a lottery with a €1 million prize is launched, people are likely to try their luck and every ticket holder will hope against hope that /she will be the lucky one and become. One will also start imagining what one could do with €1 million: do this or that, help the children, buy a good apartment, get a luxury car, tour several countries and so on.
The lottery carrot is therefore dangled in front of the consumer in the same way it would be for a donkey.
The promoters will most definitely have done their homework and computations to ensure a hefty return before launching. The question here is a simple one: how much return should one expect?
Initially, the lottery used to be drawn every two months and two editions were held.
The present lottery system only seems to make the promoters happy
A total of 700,000 tickets are released for sale each week, selling at €10 each. Now let’s, for the sake of argument, say 500,000 tickets are sold. That would mean an intake of €5 million. Therefore, the promoters made an estimated €10 million from the first two lotteries.
The prizes won were as follows: first lottery winnings – €171,247 and second – €60,940. Apart from the payment of commissions to ticket sellers, the rest were profits. Not bad. Not bad at all, in fact.
If the first prize is not won, it will go up by €200,000 in the next edition. This happened only once. This was revised to an increase of €50,000 and, lately, to €20,000 each time the top prize was not won.
Initially, it was also established that if the first prize was not won, €300,000 will be added to the other winnings. Some insist that, in fact, only €165,000 were. Was this the case and, if so, why? After only two editions, the system was changed to a weekly lottery with tickets selling at €3. Thus, instead of monthly lottery ticket sales, these are now sold every week. This also means that, rather than selling €10 tickets every two months, in the same period the promoters can offer patrons €24 worth of tickets. The prizes were to remain static.
Now, let’s list the winnings so far: first draw – €171,297; second – €60,940 (in both editions the tickets cost €10 each); third – €60,669; fourth – €12,559; fifth – 28,497; sixth – €3,118; seventh – €10,221; eighth – €28,014; ninth – €1,716; 10th – €21,733; 11th – €2,244 and 12th – €1,984. This works out at total winnings of €402,992.
If in the first two lotteries, 500,000 tickets costing €10 each were sold in every edition, the total intake would amount to about €10 million before deducting winnings and commissions.
From the other 10 lotteries, when tickets were sold at €3 and assuming a similar number of tickets were sold, revenue amount to €1.5 million per lottery, for a total of €15 million. Adding the intake from the first two lotteries, the grand total would rise to €25 million, again prior to paying prizes and commissions.
An income of €25 million minus prizes totalling €402,992. The value of the commission to agents is unknown.
This is very good indeed for the lottery promoter.
Given the above, can anybody blame citizens is they insist that a fair deal is devised and regulated by the Lotteries and Gaming Authority?
It ought to be pointed out that leaflets were distributed containing ‘Tips for responsible gaming’. These apply to all gaming and not just the grand lottery.
A new 15-minute game is to be introduced soon to complement the others already in place.
Of course, these are crafty and diabolic systems launched to literally extract money from people’s pockets.
In the past, the national lotteries drawn under the auspices of the government offered Lm50,000 or Lm100,000 prizes with tickets costing 10 shillings. The top prizes were won on every draw. This, at least, was fair because at least one person could be happy as s/he would be a little bit better off financially. This contrasts sharply with the present system, which only seems to make the promoters happy.
I believe that the junior minister responsible for gaming is in duty bound to look into the matter and if this lottery is to stay then the system should be revised to make it as fair as possible for both the players and the promoter.