#oneaday Day 418: A little flutter

I am not, generally speaking, a betting man, but I do have an occasional flutter on the National Lottery. This usually consists of me loading up my account with £10, playing two lines of whatever the next draw game is, then using the rest of the £10 to play a few of the "instant win" games. If, at any point, I go above the £10 I started at, I cash out. If I hit zero, I stop playing. This is how you stay in control of things.

The instant win games do frustrate me, though, because it's painfully transparent that they've worked everything out in advance of you even starting to play them, making the actual "playing" process feel more than a bit pointless at times. I don't know if this is just the side of me who understands how video games work talking, but there are a number of observations I have which make playing these games particularly annoying:

• If a game has multiple ways to win a prize and you win a prize on one of them, none of the others will yield a prize, even though you have to keep playing "just to see" if you win anything else.
• If a game is dependent on "random chance" such as virtual dice rolls or pulling letters out of a bag, at least one case of you taking that chance will be completely useless to you — for example, in the National Lottery's Cashword games, there will always be at least one letter you draw that doesn't appear anywhere on the board.
• If a game should theoretically be based on recognisable odds — such as, say, the frequency with which different letters appear in English words — then the game will almost always be manipulated in such a way as to subvert those odds. Looking at Cashword again, don't count on pulling an "E" being particularly good for your chances, despite it being one of the most commonly used letters in English.
• If a game offers you what appears to be a "1 in something" chance — e.g. a 1 in 3 chance of revealing your token beneath three thimbles, as seen in the National Lottery's Monopoly Gold Classic game, more often than not the chance is actually 0 in 3, because your token just isn't there at all.
• A game will quite frequently present its outcome as being that you "nearly" won — for example, in the case of Monopoly Gold Classic, it's not at all unusual to end the game just needing one additional colour card to get the £100,000 prize. This does not mean you actually nearly won. It is, in most cases, the game artificially attempting to make itself more exciting.
• Games which appear to be based on skill and timing are nothing of the sort. What a spinning wheel lands on has been determined even before you started spinning it.
• Games which appear to let you use your intelligence are, likewise, nothing of the sort. They are pure chance.
• Most instant win games barely qualify as "games" at all; you might as well just be paying £1 to click a button that says "DID YOU WIN?"

I think being aware of all these things and keeping them in mind any time I have a little flutter on the Lottery website is what keeps me from ever getting sucked in to anything gambling-related. Being aware that everything you do on the National Lottery website is nothing more than a prize draw, whether it is declared one or not, makes it a lot easier to set yourself some limits, have a brief little dopamine hit from thinking "it could be me!" and then not being all that disappointed when your £10 has vanished.

I appreciate that some people find it a tad harder to stop gambling once they start. I'm glad I've never fallen into that particular trap. And hey, you never know. One day it could be me. That'd be nice.

For now, though, it absolutely isn't.

---

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.