A lottery is a form of gambling involving the drawing of lots to win a prize. Unlike many other forms of gambling like poker or horse racing, a lottery is not a skill based game but a game of chance.
100 years ago lotteries were illegal in most countries. Nowadays, it is usual for governments to regulate lottery activity, although in some countries lotteries are still outlawed. It is now not uncommon for governments to actively encourage lotteries by endorsing their own state or national lotteries. One such country is the United Kingdom who granted a licence to run a state lottery back in 1994. The National Lottery as it is now known as has changed and grown since it’s inception and has become the most popular forms of gambling in the UK with games such as Lotto, Lotto Plus 5, Lotto HotPicks and Thunderball offering the public the chance to win life changing amounts of money every day of the week. In 2004, the pan European lottery game EuroMillions was also added to the mix making it possible for someone to win a jackpot of up to £180 million.
Lotteries can come in many different formats. Some lotteries offer fixed prizes that can include houses or cars although it is more common for the prize to be a sum of money. There are some inherent risks attached to running a lottery of this type as it is possible that the amount of stake money wouldn’t match the value of the prize leaving the lottery operator out of pocket. More commonly, the value of the prize is fixed as a percentage of the receipts. This protects the lottery operators but can also restrict the size of the prize. Recently, as with the National Lottery, lotteries allow their players to select the numbers on the lottery tickets. This can result in their being multiple winners of a jackpot prize, or their not being any winners at all. In such cases it is often the case that the jackpot prize is ‘rolled over’ into the next lottery draw resulting in much higher jackpots. It is this such occurence that has resulted in players winning jackpots worth £150m plus in the UK alone.
The recent popularity of lotteries around the world with the general public has been attributed to the feel-good factor that can come from buying a ticket. Many players claim to get a thrill out of buying a ticket and fantasising about the possibilty of winning an enormous jackpot. As lotteries around the world continue to evolve offering more player choice and interaction, and as the jackpots increase in size, there is no sign of the lottery phenomenon slowing down soon.
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