My Definitive Guide to the Spanish Elgordo Lotto
If this is the first time you’ve come across the part of the Euromillions Euro lotto that is the El Gordo Loteria, you will definitely want to know more. With payouts up to more than two and a half billion Euros, the lottery claims one of the richest jackpots in the world. Even that isn’t the only thing that is remarkable here. This lottery offers up more than 13,000 prizes, which makes for a winner for every six tickets. Pretty good by the standards of the prizes featured by other lotteries.
There is one draw per month in the Euromillions Euro lottery. But three months a year play host to bigger drawings for even bigger prizes. The most substantial of all these lotteries is the Xmas lottery, “El Gordo”, while the two other bigger lotteries take place in January (“El Nio”) and in summer (“San Ildefonso”).
Unlike typical lottery systems, the El Gordo Lottery employs balls with five digits printed on each in a range from 00,000 to 84,999. During the draw a ball is drawn from a bowl to find the winning number and another ball is drawn from a second bowl to determine the amount of the prize.
To enter the lottery, one option is a full ticket, termed a “serie”. There is also a cheaper option; called a “décimo” valued at one-tenth of a full ticket. These options have the same chance to win, although their share of the payout varies according to how much you spent at the start. That’s why many people playing the Euromillions Euro lotto instead use the e-lottery scheme. Everyone is assured of winning a prize when participating in the e-lottery system. All you do is buy into the El Gordo Lottery syndicate and they’ll sort you into teams. Each team is assigned an identifying number from zero to nine, the last digit of the winning number in the draw identifying the team that wins the prize. A fair distribution of the spoils amongst the team follows. Everyone subscribes again for the next month’s lottery and it starts all over again.
The concept of sharing the jackpots is cause for concern to some players. The thing to remember is there’s still plenty to go around when the original prize was more than two and a half billion Euros. With a guaranteed win each month, the e-lottery is both more affordable and less of a worry as you know you’ll get a return. There is clearly no smarter way to play…
