Spanish Lottery
The regular Spanish Lottery game is a weekly 6 from 49 game, similar to many countries national lotteries. Prizes tend to be around the 9 million Euros level. There are other games too, the Daily 6/49 and the Sunday 5/54+1.
But most people know Spain for 'El Gordo'. This draw is a national obsession - incredibly about 98% of the population of Spain play in the Christmas draw! It's simply become a Spanish tradition to play. Numbers are even reserved and passed down the generations. Spanish people even collect old tickets.
Part of the reason so many play, and the reason for it being one of the most famous lotteries in the world is due to the massive prize fund. Normally this is well over a billion Euros, with a jackpot of 20 million Euros. And you do have around 1-in-3 chance of picking up a prize as there are so many smaller prizes paid out, 30 to 40 thousand of them!
El Gordo tickets are confusing. You don't pick numbers in the traditional way, instead you buy ready printed tickets with numbers already on them. There are also multiple tickets with the same number (confused yet!). And the total amount of numbers available sometimes change, there were 85,000 different numbers in the Christmas 2006 draw (so 85,000 little balls were actually placed in a draw machine, and yes, thousands of them slowly drawn one by one! There is actually a second machine where balls are also drawn to allocate the prizes!).
Each ticket number is available in 10 'series' - that is, 10 lots of the same ticket number. El Gordo tickets are roughly the size of a sheet of paper, and are also split into 10 smaller tickets called 'decimas'. You are allowed to buy either the ticket of 10 decimas, or you can buy just part of the ticket. The prize you win depends on how many decimas you bought, so if you only bought 5, you win half the ticket prize. But what this means is you would need to buy 100 decimas to hold the entire ticket number outright. At 20 Euros for a decima this is not cheap. So it's very common for families and friends, even entire Spanish villages to pool their lottery money together, even just to buy a single decima. It's also common to spread your purchase by buying a single decima across multiple different lottery ticket numbers (better chances of winning in exchange for a smaller piece of the prize).
The El Gordo draw used to be just 22 December every year. A Summer draw (14th July) was introduced in 2000, with additional draws since now giving 6 draws a year. The prizes are still enormous but the tradition surrounding the Christmas draw ensures it remains the most popular.
Spanish Lottery Syndicate Reviews
