Lotteries- A Quick Guide

While contests where the objective is to create a sim or build a lot are fun, they are also time consuming endeavors. Dur to outside factors (family, school, work) many people may not have the time for participating in or hosting those types of contests. A delightful alternative is the lottery! Not to be confused with the "win once in 40,000 years" variety, a forum based lottery contest poses no risk to the participant. They are also incredibly flexible, allowing the host to customize their lottery to their tastes.

How you run your lottery is up to you. You might want to list numbers and have participants choose one. You may list participants in numerical order as they enter. Perhaps you want to add a twist where participants may only nominate their friends to win the prizes. Or maybe you'd like your lottery to be more like the real life kind where participants have to choose a set of numbers to stake their claim on. There are many ways to make your lottery as unique as you are! However you decide to run your lottery, be sure to explain your rules and methods clearly at the start so all participants understand.

There are a few ways to determine winners. The host may be inclined to write all of the participants names on paper and draw winners from a hat. A simpler (and more environmentally responsible) method is to use the Random Sequence Generator provided at RANDOM.ORG.This generator will also help you choose your numbers if you have chosen a more traditional lottery method.

First, we will explore the "drawing from a hat" style lottery. You need to know how many entries you have and how many winners you will pick. For the following example we will be assuming 50 entries with 6 winners. A first, second, and third place winner will be chosen along with 3 consolation prizes. This works whether you let people choose which number they had, or whether you listed them in the order they entered.

Where it asks for the "Smallest value" enter 1, and for the "Largest value" enter 50 (this is the range from which winners will be chosen). The part where it says "Format in _ column(s)" is negligible, however I prefer to put the number of winners I am choosing into that space, so 6 would go into that box. The form should look like this:



After clicking "Get Sequence", you should have a list of numbers, with your winners at the top, like this:



In this example, #12 would be the first prize winner, #49 is second prize, # 27 is third prize, and the last three get the consolation prize.

Now, let's say you ran a more traditional lottery. In this example we will assume you have asked that all participants choose a sequence in 5 numbers in any order chosen from numbers between (an including) 1 and 36. After all participants have listed their choices, you will need to generate a winning number combination. In the "Smallest value" field enter 1, and 36 in the "Largest value" field. In the "Format in _ column(s)" field, enter 5 for how many numbers participants were asked to choose.



Let's get our numbers!



And there you see that the 5 numbers are 1,32,25,10,29.

There you go, a simple and completely fair method of running your lottery contest! Have fun everyone!