8 Lucky Stars

Did you know the Elgordo draw is just around the corner?

Elgordo is famous for its massive prize fund and is known for making more millionaires than any other lottery.

The billion dollar prize fund is arguably the biggest in the world and people from all over buy tickets each year in the hope of winning a prize - have you got your ticket yet?

First prize payout is: $24 Million USD
37,814 Prizes worth over US$168 Million USD
AND a 1 in 3 chance of winning a prize (please note: this is a sweepstakes and although the odds are 1 in 3, this does not guarantee that you will win a prize, please play responsibly and do not overspend on this game).

BUT - TIME is running out, if you do not have your tickets then snap them up here: Buy Elgordo tickets now!

Good luck for the draw!

From Wagerseek.com, some very good advice. I’ve highlighted the ones that I think are most important to remember:

1. The first requirement is to buy a ticket. You cannot win unless you play.
2. After playing a ticket, check the numbers.3. Check to see if you have won. Numerous players won but they never bothered to check if they have won. Their prizes remain unclaimed to this day.
4. Buy, check, claim your winnings.
5. Groups or syndicates of lottery players are a good idea. If one member wins, everybody wins.
6. Your chances of winning are greater if you join a syndicate.
7. Play regularly.
8. Subscribe
9. Make it easy to play.
10. If you do not want to wait in lines or queues you should play by SMS text message.
11. If you do not want to wait in lines or queues you should play online.
12. Dream, it will make the game more fun to play.
13. Dream a lot
14. Boats, houses, cars, holidays, donating are good things to dream about.
15. Choose your numbers randomly since the winning numbers are random.
16. Use lucky dips.
17. Use random number generators.
18. Use a good spread of numbers
19. You should try 4, 13, 25, 32, and 39.
20. The following numbers may prove to be lucky 17, 24, 26, 31, 40.
21. Your friends may be luckier than you, so buy tickets for them.
22. If they win, remind them to share the winnings.
23. You may not win even if you buy 100,000 tickets.
24. Addiction is a serious problem, so do not get addicted to gambling.
25. Do not overplay
26. If you suspect that you may be suffering from gambling addiction, please seek professional help.
27. If you have serious money problems you should get professional financial help.
28. Remember that it is just a game.
29. Your problems will not be solved by the lottery.
30. Your financial problems may be overcome by the lottery if you win the big prize.
31. Be random about choosing the numbers. Do no use a system.
32. Play your numbers randomly. Do not form patterns on the ticket sheet.
33. Play your numbers randomly. Do not form zigzags on the ticket sheet.
34. Play your numbers randomly. Do not form circles, squares, or other shapes on the ticket sheet.
35. Play your numbers randomly. Do not pick numbers that have already won.
36. Play your numbers randomly. Do not pick birthdates because they stop going higher than 31.
37. Play your numbers randomly. Do not use repeating numbers because that is not random.
38. Play your numbers randomly. Do not use consecutive numbers because that is not random.
39. Do not use all even numbers.
40. Do not use all odd numbers.
41. Playing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, is not random.
42. Playing 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 is not random either.
43. Playing 7, 17, 27, 37, 47 is not random as you may have already guessed.

Barry Leiba tryies to tackle lottery-players’ general lack of understanding of statistics and numbers lottery players in his blog, where he lists five problems that that mean the vast majority of players won’t win:

1. The small up-front cost works in the lottery’s favour. If it costs one dollar to buy a ticket, the expense seems so small that it’s “worth a tryâ€?. At 100 dollars a ticket, there’d be far fewer takers. Of course, if you buy one ticket every week for two years, you’ll spend 100 dollars… and your expected return will still be so close to zero that there’s really little difference…
2. People don’t understand the concept of independent events, or they forget what they might know about it when it comes to playing the lottery. Someone who’s dutifully bought a ticket every week for two years often has some sense that he’s “due to winâ€?, that it’s “my turnâ€?. And if he misses a week because he’s away on vacation, he might actually rue that, thinking that that was the week he would have won, had he only bought a ticket. Yes, when you look at it from the beginning, your odds of a win are better if you plan to play 100 times than if you plan to play once. But if you’ve already lost 99 times, your odds of a win on your 100th play are exactly the same as those on your first: vanishingly small.
3. People, even when they ought to know otherwise, have a sense that they can “get closeâ€?, and that it matters. I heard someone say this last week, in fact: “Oh, man, this is the closest I’ve gotten! I bet I can get it next week.â€? No, sorry: if you have to match six numbers to win, and you matched five of six this time… that gives you no edge whatever toward matching six next time. Next time, and every time, you start from scratch.
4. People maintain an unreasonable level of optimism with respect to these sorts of things. “Someone has to win. It could be me!â€? Well, yes, it could be. It could also be you who gets squashed by a boulder falling from the hill you’re driving past. And you know what?: The latter is the more likely one. But we tend to be optimistic about favourable events with minuscule probabilities, while at the same time thinking that unlikely disasters with greater, but still small, probabilities are simply too remote to consider.
5. People believe in “luckâ€?. This is sort of related to the optimism thing, but rather than just reflecting an attitude, the “luckâ€? question is just one of magical thinking. “I feel lucky today.â€? I think I can beat the house, but just today, just because I felt good when I awoke, or because I found a shiny penny, or because the stars are right. Even if one can convince someone of all the points above, one can’t compete with magical thinking.

So, his advice - and mine too - is to play the lottery strictly for fun, not in any hope of winning the jackpot.

AROLINE DAY and Mei-Yin Lee thought Australia really was the lucky country when they went into a Sydney newsagency to have their Lotto ticket checked and discovered they had won a division one provisional prize of $574,000.

The British backpackers had bought a ticket for the 2004 New Year’s Eve Lotto draw and had waited four days before checking if they had won anything.

Feeding their ticket into the computer at the World Square Newsagency Bookshop was Chris Ong, described as a trusted employee who had worked at the newsagency for two years.

“He was a religious person; he went to church twice a week,” the newsagent, Michael Pavellis, told a Sydney court yesterday. “I know it sounds strange after what has happened, but he was an active member of the church band. He was a well-liked person.”

As it turned out, the backpackers’ luck was hijacked by Ong, whose real name is Chrishartato Ongkoputra……

In the end the winners got their money, but not after a long legal battle as to who was responsible for allowing Ong (who disappeared overseas and has yet to be traced) to fraudulently claim the winning lottery ticket for himself.

Read the whole story here.

Jack Whittaker wishes he’d never won the jackpot
Whittaker lost his friends, became an alcoholic, and his beloved granddaughter died - all because he won $315M on the Powerball. He says it was a curse.

Yes, it’s a sad story. But it needn’t have been like that.
He made two crucial mistakes.
First, he let everybody know he’d won this vast amount. (Although, to be fair, US Powerball winners don’t have the automatic right to anonymity that UK Lottery winners enjoy; however, there is apparently a legal loophole that will let them claim anonymously.) Unless you’re a real publicity hound with the skin of a well-worn rhino, you should keep quiet about your jackpot win and tell no more than immediate family; in fact, only those family members who can be trusted not to blab.
This will mean trying to keep everything looking normal for a while - going into work as usual, and so on. But this period of pretend-normality will give you the time to adjust to being rich; you won’t have your life turned totally upside down within a couple of days. You’ll also have the time to think about what you want to do with your new-found riches. Set up a business? Give it to charity? Give it all to the kids? Whatever it is that you eventually decide, you’ll have had the time to thoroughly evaluate and assess every option.
During this time, get some good financial advice. Here in the UK, the National Lottery has highly qualified -and discreet - financial advisers on hand to help winners. If your Lottery organisation offers that sort of help, take it.
When you do eventually decide on what to do, let on that you’ve won the lottery, but be careful to minimise the amount; tell everybody that it’s half a million or so. That’s enough to account for chucking in the job, going on holiday, buying the new house and car and splashing out on family gifts. In peoples’ eyes, you’ll be comfortably off, not mega-wealthy. Then, unlike Jack, the leeches and parasites who just want your money will stay away, and your old friends won’t be frightened off.
Jack’s second mistake was to be too generous. He gave money to everybody and anybody. He set up a charitable foundation - which was at least the right way to go - but didn’t appoint any independent trustees to run it for him and hand out the cash. So any wastrel who wrote a pitiable enough begging letter got money. He was a decent man who wanted to use his fortune for the betterment of others, but this wasn’t the way to do it.
He also lavished money on his family, especially his teenage granddaughter. At 17, she got four cars and $2000 a week cash. I don’t know about you, but I’ve not known many teenagers who would use that kind of money wisely.
Certainly, make sure your kids and grandchildren get a good start in life. The best way to do that is to set up a trust fund that will pay for things like college courses, house deposits and so on. They won’t go short of what they need, but they’ll still have to work for what they want.
The worst way is to do what Jack did and just throw cash at them. In his granddaughter’s case, the outcome was inevitable; unsuitable ‘friends’ latched onto her, she got heavily into drugs and eventually she was found dead.

So don’t follow Jack Whittaker’s example.

The jackpot for the USA MegaMillions Drawhas reached a whopping $105 Million USD!

Enter here!

The shock suspension of the national lottery will have a huge impact on shops selling tickets, and it will particularly affect corner cafes.
This was the reaction in Durban on Sunday to the suspension which comes in the wake of a legal row to determine who will run the popular fund-raising contest.
The outgoing operator, Uthingo, told players on Sunday that it would continue to pay out prizes, despite its licence expiring at midnight on Saturday.
Manish Nagessur, owner of the Montezume Food Centre in Playfair Road near the beachfront, said that 95 percent of people who bought tickets from his shop, also took advantage of their visit to buy other goods.

Read more here

I must have done something to please the gods recently. Remember last week when I posted about how I’d gotten a great new job and was moving to California? Peanuts compared to what just happened. You’re not going to believe this. I hardly believe it myself. If you’re standing, sit down, and if you’re sitting, stand up:
I just won the lottery.
Saturday morning, two days after arriving in California, I was in a 7-11 buying a Coke and some snacks to take back to the hotel and I saw a SuperLotto Plus sign advertising the $13 million jackpot. I thought to myself, “Boy, my luck sure has been great lately; how cool would it be if I actually won the lottery?”
So what the hell, I bought a ticket. I pulled some numbers out of my ass. It was 3:07 in the afternoon, so I started with 3-7. My birthday’s December 18th, so I added 18. The nutrition info on the Coke listed 33g of carbohydrates and 40mg of sodium: 33-40. Then, for the MegaBall number, I chose 2, since it was my second day in California and this was the second lottery ticket I’d bought in my entire life.
I just about shat my pants when they announced the winning numbers: 03-07-18-33-40…and the MegaBall? Yep: 02.
I didn’t start screaming or anything, because I had always told myself that if I ever won a million dollars I would be cool and collected. So I just sat there calmly and quietly and tried to count to a million in my head. I got to 102 before I realized how much money $13 million is.
$13 million! I’m a millionaire! A goddamn multi-millionaire! I mean, yeah, there’ll be taxes and whatnot, but still. Jesus. This just about makes up for the cost of living increase.
Of course, now all I can think about is how much work this is going to involve. I have to get the ticket verified, I have to get a financial adviser, I need to decide whether I want the lump sum or the payments, I have to fend off the hundreds of people who are going to start begging for handouts, and of course I’ve gotta do some research to make sure those numbers aren’t cursed so I don’t end up like Hurley on Lost. All while starting a new job (yes, I’m still going to go to work).
This has been one hell of a lucky month.

From Wonko.com

I don’t know what it is about visiting my parents, but it makes me want to buy lottery tickets. OK, I do know what it is. Every Christmas they give us all scratch tickets. Last year we won about 50 bucks. That wasn’t bad. And my dad used to buy tickets every week when I was a kid. I would sometimes go with him and watch him hand over his pre-filled Megabucks ticket, hoping the one dollar investment would pay off. Although he did have one $200 win once, like most people his dreams of getting lucky and hitting the jackpot are still just dreams.

I have never had a dream of winning big money in the lottery. I have been a little more pragmatic. But now I do not need to have that dream. On a whim I bought a ticket this weekend. I didn’t just buy a scratch ticket, as I usually might when I have these desires to try my luck, but a pick-your-six numbers and hope for the best ticket. When I compared my numbers to the winning numbers, I said, Hm, looks like I won. It did appear that I had matched all six numbers. I thought it must be a mistake. I saw the numbers in the newspaper (it took this novice a while to find them) so I checked on the lottery commision’s website to double-check. Even though it verified what I had read in the newspaper, I asked my wife to check it out as well. Sure enough, we had a match. Six matches in fact.

This was not the biggest jackpot in history. The official total was about $1.2 million dollars. Of course, anyone who has ever read anything about lottery winners knows that taxes will take a chunk from the official total. After lots of guessing and then some conversations with state officials (that took some doing on a Sunday and I was surprised we managed to speak with anyone today at all), the total comes out to roughly $711,000. Not too shabby, if you ask me.

I have to admit it does not seem real. It seems like some kind of joke, or hoax, or dream even. What to do with a windfall that big? I will need to take some time to figure that out. Pay off debt? Donate to nonprofits? Have a party? Buy a Prius?

I know this: I have been lucky enough in this life and this is a big one. This is luck luck luck, no skill or talent involved. I won the lottery! Who the hell can say that without making it up?

From Beagle’s Blog

A 68-year-old grandmother from Peguis First Nation has found lightning really does strike twice, winning a $1-million lottery jackpot for a second time in little more than two years.

Phyllis Thomas yesterday accepted a cheque for the jackpot for the Set For Life Scratch ‘N’ Win lottery, the same game for which she took the big prize on March 18, 2005.

“It’s made my life wonderful, but I don’t think it has changed my life. I’m still the same person,” Thomas said of her double stroke of luck, after several family members joined her at a downtown hotel for the cheque presentation.

If she has a secret to lotto success, she’s keeping it to herself — except for one tip to others who purchase tickets.

“I would say, ‘Buy, buy.’ You never know. If it has happened twice to me, it could happen to anyone,” Thomas said.

Read more here

A newlywed couple from Rugeley scooped a lottery win within hours of their marriage, thanks to some quick thinking by the groom.
Lee Beddow forgot to buy his weekly ticket so he stopped off on the way to the church, before tying the knot with his sweetheart Jackie.
The loving couple scooped more than £2,000 in the National Lottery and have vowed to make their honeymoon extra special.
They jetted off to Jamaica today and have upgraded their flights to first class. They also have tickets to see England play Australia in the Cricket World Cup. Lee, aged 41 and a music lecturer at Stoke College, married Jackie, a 33-year-old nurse, at The Oakley Hotel in Brewood last Friday.
Minutes earlier he had bought a ticket from the Texaco garage in Boscomoor Lane, Penkridge, despite never having won more than £10 before.
The pair, who have a son James, aged six, and live off Hednesford Road, matched five numbers in the draw.
Lee, who also owns Rugeley-based recording studio Abbey Sound, said it was the best weekend of his life. “The wedding was the best day of our lives and the win on the lottery was the best icing possible on the cake,� he said.
“I remembered on my way to the wedding that I’d forgotten to buy a ticket, so I stopped at a garage on the way to pick one up. I had my ticket checked in my local shop on Sunday morning and was shocked when I was told I’d matched five numbers.�
But the happy couple had to change honeymoon plans at the last minute because their hotel had not been completed. They were originally due to fly to Antigua for the cricket match but had to swap destinations to Ocho Rios.
Lee added: “We’ve got tickets for England against Australia, so the money will come in useful to find a way to still get there.�

From www.expressandstar.com