Bananalotto has slipped into second place! (thedailydraw.com)

Member Name: oatmeal

Product:	thedailydraw.com
Date:	08/08/01 (70 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free to enter, Better than the rest

Disadvantages: Fussy site, The odds are still very long

Those of you who are familiar with Bananalotto will know how this works.
The mechanics of this lottery are very similar to the national game but it is free to enter, is drawn daily rather than weekly and is entirely web based. There are 64 numbers to chose from instead of the traditional 50, and you have to select six numbers. To win the jackpot of £1,00,000 you need to match all six numbers, so the odds of winning are even more distant than the national game.
The prizes look something like this…

4 numbers from 6 £25
5 numbers from 6 £5000
6 numbers from 6 £1000,000

I have been playing on and off for two months. I have won once, a £25 prize last week, from which the cheque arrived today. There is testimony from six players who have won the £5000 in recent months featured on the site. No one has yet won the jackpot. On the whole, the odds are now more favourable than Bananalotto who have recently ditched their minor prizes given for three numbers.

Bananalotto (See my review for them) and The Daily Draw are similar enough to warrant a direct comparison. The Daily Draw site is slower to load and the Flash based programming seems a little temperamental. It also requires more effort from the user as it will not recognise you when loading and will always require the manual input of your user name and password. Once logged in you are taken to the number selection screen and here you are given similar options as those found at Bananalotto. You can select a new set of numbers manually, elect for a random selection, retain a set of ‘Favourite’ numbers or repeat the same numbers as in the previous draw.
Once you have your numbers you click on one of three ad banners on the right hand side of the screen. It is this advertising revenue that finances the game and it is the same method employed at Bananalotto. Unfortunately there is an unacceptable amount of bandwidth taken up by the THREE screens that load simultan
eously following selection. Not only do you get the advertisers website but you are also diverted to the Daily Draw home page and a results page!

Results, win or lose, are sent to each participant via e-mail. There is also an accumulator prize which is run each month and your chances of winning are improved each time you enter for the daily draw. The prizes will be something like a luxury weekend away or a new computer etc. The ‘Refer a friend’ scheme here allows you to pick up £25,000 if your friend wins the jackpot.

The site is owned by those that brought you ‘Mypoints’, a reward scheme that pays out in high street vouchers (See my review for them). For those of you signed up with Mypoints you will be interested to know that there are an extra 50 points given to you simply for signing up with the Daily Draw. In addition, you gain 25 points each month if you have entered the Daily Draw at least eight times. It is just about worth my time and effort at the moment, so long as they continue to throw a guaranteed 25 Mypoints at me each month. I have the site stored in my ‘Favourites’ drop-down list and I tend to run it in a second window while I visit other sites. It takes about three minutes each day to enter depending on the speed of your connection. While it is slower and fussier than Bananalotto it offers more realistic rewards and a better chance of winning.

Summary: