The World Famous El Gordo Lottery Draw

The El Gordo (The Fat One) Christmas lotto is the most traditional lotto draw in Spain with the vast percentage of the country’s residents taking part.  As it happens, this draw has turned out to be a national hobby with 98% of Spain’s inhabitants partaking.  This is not really unexpected when you find out that the El Gordo lottery is the biggest prize fund lotto game globally.
 
The typical Spaniard spends roughly 73 Euros in the Christmas draw and in 2008 the prize fund is projected to exceed a massive €2.20 billion.  Here are a number of important features of the El Gordo lottery:
 
· More than 13,000 prizes are paid out.
· It is operated by the Spanish Government.
· There is an excellent 1 in 6 chance of winning a cash prize.
· All prizes are paid out right away and are tax exempt for Spanish citizens.
· 70% of total ticket sales are paid out in cash prizes.
 
Since December 1812 the Christmas lottery has operated in precisely the same manner year on year.  Two big sphere-shaped containers are used; one of them contains tens of thousands of small wooden balls representing all ticket numbers; the other one contains a smaller quantity of wooden balls representing the prizes to be drawn. In the Lotería Nacional hall in Madrid, pupils of the San Ildefonso School (formerly reserved for orphans of public servants) draw the numbers and corresponding prizes, singing the results out loud in front of the public while Spanish radio and television stations transmit the occasion. 

Owing to the considerable quantity of numbers and prizes, this process takes roughly three hours to finish.  In recent years, in excess of 4,800 individual numbers have won at least €1,000 per billete (€100 per décimo) in the Christmas draw.  Those who do not win often make the predictable comment that “it’s health that really matters”. Players who simply recoup their entry fee will often re-invest the winnings in a ticket for El Niño, the second most important draw, held on the 6th of January each year.

The two vessel routine is the traditional way of drawing the numbers in Spanish lotteries but this system is now kept solely for the legendary Christmas lotto draw.  The remainder of the weekly draws as well as the five other yearly El Gordo draws utilize five vessels with ten balls in each, from where the winning numbers are pulled out.

Lotto shops in Spain mostly only sell tickets for one or two numbers, so the winners of the largest prizes often live in the same city or district or work for the same corporation.  In 2005, the winning number was sold in the town of Vic in Catalonia (population 37,825), whose inhabitants scooped in the region of €500 million.

For many years, you could only participate in the El Gordo if you were a Spanish resident.  However, with the introduction of lottery ticket sales agents you now have the opportunity to partake in this globally celebrated Spanish lottery regardless of where you live globally.  Some international El Gordo syndicates have also been set up to not only allow more people access to this lottery but to improve their odds of collecting cash prizes also.

This entry was posted on 23/11/2008 at 03:36 pm and is filed under Lottery Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.