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Ten Lines in the Official Rules, and What They Actually Mean

Nobody reads them. They are also the only document that tells you what you are actually playing for, and roughly half of it is there because somebody once got sued.

12 min read · page 3 of 11

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“A purchase will not improve your chances of winning”

The sentence that makes the free route real rather than decorative.

It is one thing to offer a free way in. It is another for that free way in to be worth the same as the paid one.

This clause is the promise that a mailed-in entry sits in exactly the same pool, with exactly the same odds, as an entry that came with a purchase. A free route with worse odds is not an alternative means of entry; it is a fig leaf over a lottery, and regulators treat it as one.

It is worth appreciating how much weight this puts on the operator. They have to accept postcards, transcribe them, and drop them into the same draw as the scanned codes — with all the cost and fiddliness that implies. That cost is the price of the promotion being lawful.