Barnadi has left me...to spend a week with his family in Indonesia that is. His sister is a dentist and he needs some fillings done. Also it is his niece's second birthday so he is enjoying spending time spoiling her rotten in the way all good uncles should do. So while Barnadi is enjoying his time in Jakarta, I am left in cold rainy Melbourne. Since I dropped him off at the airport on Monday the weather has been abysmal, cold, windy and unrelenting rain. Still I have been at work most of the time so it doesn't really matter and in my time off I have made up for Barnadi's absence with multiple trips to Northcote plaza and cake baking. I even kept up Barnadi's habit of buying a lottery ticket every day, not that we ever win more than a division 5 or 6 prize. Barnadi always used to buy a lottery ticket for the UK lottery while we lived in Bath, but in the entire 8 years that I have known him we managed to win a £10 prize ONCE. Since moving to Australia we seem to win these small $10-20 prizes on a more regular basis, but never enough to cover the cost of the tickets. Barnadi still insists on playing however, as he quite rightly points out 'You have to be in it to win it'.
The lottery in Australia is quite a complicated arrangement, there is a different game on every night of the week, and all have a variety of rules and ways to increase your chance of getting extra prizes. The main lottery is the Saturday night Tattslotto draw, this is your standard pick six numbers game similar to the UK game, except in Australia there are two bonus balls. The Monday and Wednesday lottos are similar to the Saturday draw, but they are cheaper and the top prize is fixed at $1 million. On Tuesday it is the Oz lotto, once again it is similar to the standard Tattslotto except their are 7 numbers to pick. The prizes are usually much higher but then so is the cost of the ticket, your chance of winning a prize however is much lower. The Thursday game is Powerball (similar to Thunderball in the UK), with this you pick 5 standard numbers and then the powerball. The odds of winning this are possibly the slimmest of all as without matching the powerball number itself you aren't even likely to get one of the smaller prizes, the main jackpot however does grow to some very substantial figures. There are a couple of other draws on Saturdays including 'The Pools' and 'Super 66', but as Barnadi never enters these games I know nothing about them.
There are several things you can do to increase your chance of winning, you can play system games where you chose more than 6 numbers, or pick 5 games where you pick less numbers but are guaranteed at least one matching number for the 6th ball. A similar strategy for the powerball game is the powerhit which grantees the powerball. All these 'cheats' come at an increased cost in the ticket and none of them will actually guarantee you winning a prize or else everyone would play them and the lottery company would go bust! The other option is to join a shop syndicate, where you can win a share of any prize won from a mixture of games played. The trouble with the syndicate is that even if the ticket wins one of the bigger prizes, by the time it is divided up between those holding a share, the actual amount you win is very small. I still can't help feeling that playing the lottery is no different from any other gambling, and that as nice as the idea of money for nothing is, it always comes at a price. Still if we ever did win a jackpot prize, I wouldn't say no.
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