International Lottery

I read in a newspaper recently that we could be just four years away from the launch of a new international lottery – something I previously talked about in my World Lottery post back in February 2007.

Lucy Cuckroft’s piece in the Daily Telegraph didn’t reveal much that avid lottery fans won’t already know, but it did contain an interesting quote from David Forrest, a Professor of Economics at the University of Salford. The quote that struck me was this: “With a lottery you are selling a dream to the public. If a product comes along with a bigger dream, people will switch to it.”

The idea here is that if a lottery comes along offering a larger jackpot than the ones we normally play for, we will automatically switch over to the new game. It sounds plausible enough at first glance, but personally I don’t think that the theory holds water.

For a long time the UK Lotto was the only game around that gave us a shot at winning millions of pounds by being lucky enough to match the right numbers at the right time. Then along came EuroMillions – a lottery many times bigger that offered jackpots you couldn’t dream of when playing the Lotto. If the idea that the lottery offering the biggest dream would win everyone over was accurate, we should all have stopped playing the Lotto (and all lottery games with lower prizes such as Dream Number, Thunderball and scratchcards) and be focused on EuroMillions. But that hasn’t happened.

Yes, many of us play EuroMillions, but we tend to do so in addition to the UK Lotto and other games. And when the new international lottery is launched I think most of us will simply add that game to our list of interests, rather than “switching over” and playing the world lottery exclusively.

I say this because I don’t think National Lottery players are only interested in the size of the top prize. We’re also interested in playing lotteries that give us the best chance of winning, and these are often the games with lower jackpots.

Of course, when massive jackpots do come along they are sure to attract our attention, but as far as stealing our loyalty from other games is concerned, it simply won’t happen. We all like to dream big, but we also like to take into account the odds of our dreams coming true.

Article Last Updated: 18/03/2009 18:12:01

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