Just like buying clothes, booking a holiday or listening to music, the nature of lottery playing has been entirely transformed by the internet. While National Lottery stands are still a feature of corner shops and supermarkets up and down the country, the state-franchised lottery has been hit hard by online competition and has experienced plunging sales as a result.
Instead of buying tickets or scratch cards from a shop, the public increasingly play the lottery online. Online lottery companies have drawn in players with more accessible and fun ways to play, something the National Lottery has been forced to follow in recent times. In this piece, we’ll outline some of the ways the internet has changed lottery gambling.
Online syndicates make collective playing simpler and more secure
Playing as part of a syndicate is one of the more popular ways to play the lottery. By entering lottery draws as part of a group and buying multiple tickets together, individuals enhance their chances of winning. This used to be an activity exclusive to the offline world, with friends, family and colleagues normally making up a syndicate’s participants. But the internet has opened up new possibilities for syndicate playing, creating forums and entire communities where players can come together to form groups.
One significant drawback of traditional lottery syndicates is the organisation it takes to get them set up. From finding enough willing members and drawing up a syndicate agreement, to collecting money from everyone and actually buying the tickets, they’re not exactly an easy way to play the lottery. Another major drawback is the risk of deceit by fellow syndicate members. There have been numerous cases of groups refusing to share winnings with certain syndicate members, or even syndicate managers running off with money themselves.
With online syndicates, the above issues are avoided entirely. Players are automatically entered into groups with others, tickets are purchased with a click of a button, and issues like distribution of winnings are covered in the terms and conditions, ensuring prize winners are guaranteed their money. There are various lottery syndicate companies out there for players to choose from, with brands like Lotto Social, LottoGo and Jackpot.com taking care of everything on a player’s behalf.
Interactive online games make lottery playing more fun than ever
The days of going down to a local corner shop to buy a lottery ticket or scratchcard are, for many, long gone. The internet has created more interactive ways to win money, with instant win games giving players the chance to collect a jackpot and have fun in the process, all from the comfort of their home.
Take the National Lottery’s Monopoly Gold game. Based on the classic board game, players get the chance to play an online variation of the game, rolling virtual dice in the hope of landing on properties and scooping prizes, with the possibility of bagging up to £50,000. This is just one of the three Monopoly-based games currently offered by the National Lottery, with classics like Uno and Scrabble also inspiring their own instant win games on the site. There have been many stories of punters winning big on these games—for example, Scotsman Michael Innes made headlines when he scooped £1million on the Monopoly Millionaire game the National Lottery used to offer.
Launching these games is the National Lottery’s attempt to keep up with the competition, with other online lottery companies having instant win games on their sites for some time now. Akin to the kind of games you’d see on a pub quiz machine, you can find anything from bingo and casino games, to other themed games based on popular TV and film series like Game of Thrones and Tomb Raider. Offering gamblers the chance to win anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of pounds, the internet has certainly made lottery playing more fun than ever before.
Lottery apps make lottery playing more accessible
Want to win the lottery? There’s an app for that. People use their phones for everything nowadays, and playing the lottery is no different. This makes doing so much simpler than ever before. Players can use an app to randomly generate numbers and buy tickets in the first place, with some apps even offering stats on which numbers are drawn more frequently than others.
Lottery players can also use the apps to see if they’ve won, no matter how large or small the prize. Winnings can unfortunately often get overlooked—in 2017, over £125 million went unclaimed from National Lottery games alone. Yet with lottery apps, this problem has been consigned to the past. Instead of having to keep track of winning numbers to check whether they’ve won, app users are immediately notified if this is the case, ensuring they do not miss out on what’s rightfully theirs.
