Do you buy your lottery tickets week in and week out in the hopes of striking it lucky? Maybe it’s time to up your chances of winning, and you can do that with a lottery syndicate.
A syndicate is a group of lottery players who split the cost of tickets, enabling them to play more games. Of course, playing more games increases your winning chances.
How Lottery Syndicates Work
Essentially, syndicates pool their money to buy more tickets. That means when you join a syndicate, you’re almost instantly more likely to win something. It’s pretty straight forward.
On the downside, if you win big, you do have to split the winnings with everyone else in the syndicate.
What you need to ask yourself is this: would you prefer to share a small part of a big lottery jackpot or have a big share in nothing?
It’s for those reasons that syndicates are popular amongst lottery players who’d prefer to win something than nothing at all.
Let’s look at a few more pros and cons of playing with a syndicate.
Lottery Syndicates – the Downside
The biggest downfall of playing in a syndicate is obvious. You’re never going to win the full jackpot value if all your numbers come up. If the group holds a winning combination, you have to share the winnings amongst group members. Yes, you’ll win a prize, but nothing compared to what you’d win if you alone had the winning ticket.
Another disadvantage of a syndicate involves the smaller wins. If a group of 20 players wins $500, you’re only going to get $25 each.
What’s more, playing in a syndicate means you’re actually less likely to come out on top on any draw. Over the long run, your odds stay the same – but that’s regardless of whether you go it alone or play in a group. But those smaller wins, like Division Six and Seven prizes, are so small they might not even cover your entire cost of buying tickets. That means you actually end up with a small loss.
Playing in a syndicate takes some variance out of your lottery game, and while you might be more likely to win a share of a bigger prize, you’re most likely to lose at a rate equal to the lottery game’s house edge.
It’s not all negative, though. There are a few advantages to playing with a syndicate.
The Benefits of Playing with a Lottery Syndicate
If you want to play lotteries frugally, a syndicate is a way to go. Joining a group of players doesn’t guarantee that the group’s going to win a major jackpot, but it does make those odds look ever so slightly less astronomical.
Besides increasing your chances of winning the jackpot, playing with a syndicate increases your chances of small division wins, too. Sometimes those consolation prizes are big enough to at least cover the cost of your tickets.
Syndicates Can Win Big
In January this year, the eight biggest Mega Millions jackpot ever was won by a syndicate in New York. 23 Long Island coworkers scooped the $437 million jackpot and they quickly set up a legal entity called New Life 2019 LL so they could anonymously collect their winnings.
The group decided to take the lump sum payment which came to $176,155,308 after federal and state taxes. That worked out to a very decent $7.7 million per player in the group.
Some players said they play as part of the syndicate every week. Each member puts a dollar in an envelope and one person goes off to purchase the tickets for the syndicate. This time around, the $23 ticket the group purchased paid off more than they could have hoped!
Which Do You Prefer?
It all comes down to preference. If you have big dreams of striking it big and not sharing the pot, then go it alone. But if you want to increase your chances of winning something, even slightly, a syndicate is the way to go.
How do you prefer to play?