It is not known exactly how or when lotteries began but we do know that it was a very long time ago as there are refernces in the bible – Moses used a lottery to award land west of the River Jordan. In 1567 in England,Queen Elizabeth I established the first English state lottery. Amongst the prizes were cash, plates, and tapestry and 400,000 tickets offered for sale. Whilst in Ammerica Benjamin Franklin used lotteries to finance cannons for the Revolutionary War and John Hancock organised a lottery to rebuild the historic Faneuil Hall in Boston.
After the internet started to become popular VWD E-lottery was founded in 2002 – the brainchild of Tom Brodie and Len Fitzgerald who had known each other some 8 years prior to setting up the business. Tom had had a successful career in Sales and Marketing spanning 12 years but when in 1995 he was introduced to The Internet, his life changed. Len had spent twenty years running a successful business in the video industry and is credited with opening one of the first ever video rental stores in the UK in 1980.
It occurred to them that just about everyone on Earth would love to win a lottery jackpot but only a few very lucky people actually do. So they deliberated and thought that it would be a good idea if rather than just a couple of people winning multi million pound jackpots there was a way that numerous people, all willing to share a big jackpot, could greatly improve their chances.
After a good deal of research they were able to come up with lottery syndicates that stacked the odds of winning much more in favor of the players. Lottery syndicates were not, of course, a new idea but they could be made much more sophisticated with the help of computers and The Internet. And so the multiple-prize-winning system was born.
The UK National Lottery is one of the biggest, lump-sum, tax-free lotteries in the world. It is played twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays and the draw can be watched on National Television.
Players join E-Lottery online and members get allocated a place in a 49-player UK syndicate. They then get an email containing their virtual E-Lottery Membership Card which details the syndicate’s 5 lottery numbers, picked from 1 to 49, which are then entered automatically in to the draw every Wednesday and Saturday. There are only 5 main numbers because those 5 numbers are combined with every other remaining number to produce 44 different lines. This way each syndicate is always guaranteed to match at least one number. This dramatically increases your chances of winning the jackpot from 1 in 14 million to 1 in 1.9 million which is a 702% increase. And your odds of winning a smaller prize increase to only 1 in 13.
After each draw the numbers are automatically checked and any winning are sent directly to the players. So no more having to fill out tickets or kicking yourself if you forget to even buy a ticket. It’s all done for you from the comfort of your own armchair.
Lisa Davies is a freelance writer. For more information about E-Lottery syndicates visit VWD-E-Lottery at http://www.vwd-e-lottery.com