For as long as people have had to entertain themselves, there has always been more than enough games of chance. Whether there was money or any other commodity of trade involved, people, especially men have always wanted to go against each other and see who’s right. Well, the lottery is really no different. This is a legal gambling option where people go against the draw machine believing that they can accurately predict what numbers the machine will pick. Men and women are all welcome to play, as long as they have valid identification and they are over the age of eighteen.
If one really thinks about, the lottery is almost the same as the raffle at church or at school. Remember those? When they needed a new printer at school and it couldn’t wait, the headmistress would buy a big cake and the teachers would sell raffle tickets for about R1 each. In a school of about seven hundred children, if only five hundred played the raffle over a couple of days, the school could easily get a brand new printer for the teachers’ office by the end of the week.
Just as in the raffle, a lot of people put money into a pot so that when a winner is chosen, there is enough money in the pot to pay the winner and still have some money left over. The first couple of weeks of the lotto were very quiet. South Africans have been scammed so much, even by the government, that they first wanted to see if there was any truth to this large scale raffle that promised to change people’s lives before they put some money in it. Even those that did play did not want to lose a lot of money so they placed very small bets.
When the first lotto millionaire was announced, things really turned around for the better for the lottery. People now had proof that the machines were not rigged and the government had not unleashed a scam on them. South African flocked to the Lotto betting points in their numbers and have not looked back.