Imagine a lottery that sold out 800,000 tickets on the very first day it was launched; well that’s the South African National Lottery for you. Established in 2000, the South African National Lottery has one of the biggest player bases of all national lotteries in the world. In its first three weeks, R70 million worth of ticket sales were recorded.

To some extent, this immense popularity can be owed to the massive marketing effort that accompanied the launch of the lottery that aimed at covering 80% of the population. In 2006, it was estimated that 82% of the entire population actually played the lottery once a week. For about 53% of the population, lottery was the only form of chance-based games that they indulged in.

South Africa Lottery History

The organization behind the lottery was Uthingo Management Ltd which ran and operated the South African National Lottery till March 2007. On October 2007, the operations were transferred to the Gidani consortium. Gidani was no slouch when it came to ticket sales either, clocking more than 200,000 tickets sold in the first three hours after opening under the new operators. Since then, Gidani has been running the lottery, supported by a technical partnership with the Greek lottery firm Intralot and under the supervision of the National Lotteries Board, South Africa.

Gidani is also responsible for distributing 34% of the revenues generated from the lottery into a charitable fund, 6% is paid as retail commission, 10% goes towards operational costs and the remainder 50% is paid out in the form of prizes.

South Africa Lotto Bad Habits

As with all popular activities involving chance, a large number of Lotto South Africa players have rather curious superstitions while choosing their numbers. Let’s take a look at the more prevalent of these customs:

• Choosing numbers that have already won: Too many people believe that luck stops with the winning ticket and forget that it is the player who won, not the ticket. Therefore, they pick numbers that have already won, believing that these numbers are lucky. Curiously, they do not pick numbers from more recent draws.
• Choosing numbers in a sequence: Selecting numbers that appear in a sequence seems to give the wrong impression of having ‘covered the board’ and the number of people who play sequential numbers is astounding.
• Choosing numbers based on a ‘tip’: Tips are like gift horses, you should resist the temptation to look in their mouths. Regardless of the fact that almost all tips pan out in failure, people still believe that there is some secret information out there that can make a win fall in their laps.
• Choosing numbers on the calendar: Birthdays; that’s what seems to drive some people. They pick important dates such as birthdays and anniversaries. This leads to an imbalanced sale of numbers which only go up to 31! After all there are only 31 days in a month.

Regardless of the prevalent quirks, Lotto South Africa still remains an immensely popular game.

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