You'd be lucky if you win! (thedailydraw.com)

Member Name: robertliu84

Product:	thedailydraw.com
Date:	04/06/02 (136 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's Free!

Disadvantages: Fixed?

This site lets you enter a daily draw to win a £1 MILLION. They also offer lower prizes of £5000 and £25.

As the domain suggests, it's a daily draw. Well they draw on week days but you can enter it daily. How it works is simple. You pick 6 number just like the National Lottery. However your chances of winning a million here is less, since there are now 64 numbes to choose from rather than 49. A few presses on my calculator gives 74,974,368 different possible combinations, unlike the National Lottery's 13,983,816. This makes it about 5 times less likely to get all 6 numbers right. However the good thing about thedailydraw.com is that it is completely free.

So you would expect that it would be more difficult to win if it was free to enter. There are some catches. You must be 16 or over for any chance of playing to win a million. You must also be a UK resident, and of course you need to sign up. This involves giving your name, age, and address/contact details (in case you ever win). Surprisingly there has been NO junk mail, or any mail that has been unwanted. I think there was an option when signing up to not receive it. The only mail I get from them is the winning numbers, and my selected numbers. I would also get an email if I won...but that's IF. Any how, it's been quite simple.

Everyday I log on, press select last numbers, and that's it. It takes about 1 minute a day. One thing you must do to play is after selecting you numbers you need to click on an advert that they have which are usually relevant to you as when signing up you select your interests. Clicking on one of these probably gives them money, which goes towards the prizes. After this your numbers are validated and all you need to do is wait for the draw which is done at midnight, under "strict supervision" bla bla bla...well that's what they say.

There have been quite a few £5000 winners, so it is possible! If you match all 6 - you
have a million pounds. 5 - £5000, 4 - £25. All is free, so I thought try it out.

Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Since writing my original opinion on Ciao, there have been a few changes, that is, increasing your chances of winning a prize. Now you can play twice a day, as long as you wait an hour between each day, you can have two chances of having a go at winning. You could try choosing exactly the same numbers, so that if you were to match up 6 numbers, you'd win TWO MILLION POUNDS!!, but you're probably better off selecting a different combination, which increases your chance of winning something!!.

thedailydraw.com has also made it easier to play, so that you don't need to log in with a username and password each time. Simply click on a link, and add it to your favourites, and you'll be taken to the number pick page straight away.

There has also been an extra game to play, a scratchcard. I'm a bit cautious about the authenticity of this game. Firstly, you can win prizes from £5 to £5000, which you find out by revealing a "scratch" panel. Then you have to scratch off 4 fireballs from 16 panels, where 4 are fireballs and the remaining 12 are blank. Now, as a mathematician, you'd have to do some maths to see what the chancse are of winning:
4/16 x 3/15 x 2/14 x 1/13 = 1/1820. That is you have 1 in 1820 chance of getting all four fireballs. This is assuming that the chance of getting a win is equal, i.e. that winning cards a decided first hand and not altered during play. Since it is a flash applet, I'm sure it would be very easy to write a short algorithm to slim the chances for you of winning. For my first play I think I had a chance of winning £200, and my first 3 picks found me a 3 fireballs, but on my fourth was just a blank. All my other plays have just been £5 prizes and I rarely pick a fireball now. In my personal opinion, the scratchcard cannot be policed as easily and I
think it's all fixed.

But in the end, it's free, and all you lose is a few minutes of your time.

Summary: