The big crazy Spanish Christmas lottery draw is now over for 2009. Life in Spain can return to normal once more – well, back to preparations for Christmas celebrations anyway.

El Gordo Winning Numbers

The winning number of the big prize was 78294. And winners stories are already beginning to appear. One of the big winners was a work syndicate at troubled Spanish travel company Viajes Marsans. Great news for a company who were in the process of making a large numer of their staff redundant.

There are thousands of numbers, and tens of thousands of prizes with El Gord. If you want to check your numbers here’s the full El Gordo results.

€2.3 Billion of El Gordo Prizes Won

When the dust settles this superdraw lottery will have paid out an incredible 2.3 billion Euros to winners. Just for this one draw. It doesn’t have anything like the biggest jackpot, but it is still the biggest lottery in the world.

Did you play this year? Did you win? Let us know below.

Spain has loads of saints and tons of fiestas to go with them. But this makes even the craziest of them look about as exciting as getting a pair of socks for Christmas…

Seriously, the entire country comes to a halt when this ONCE A YEAR draw hits.

The draw process takes HOURS because there are so many prizes. It’s quite a bizarre thing to watch the enormous draw machine, with all the results and prizes sung out by children from a local school (El Gordo draw).

It’s THE biggest lottery draw in the world. No other game has a bigger prize fund, OR pays out as many prizes.

Welcome to the Spanish ‘El Gordo’ (or ‘The Fat One’).

World’s Biggest Prize Fund

This draw pays out a prize fund of BILLIONS.

Not millions, but Billions!

But they are clever enough to keep the prizes smaller BUT pay a lot more of them. Unlike certain dumb mega-draws that insist on paying 200 million to just one prize winner… duh!

These are just the bigger prizes:-

• 195 x €3 Million prizes
• 195 x €1 Million prizes
• 195 x €500,000 prizes
• 390 x €200,000 prizes
• 1,560 x €50,000 prizes

World’s LONGEST Draw

And these are genuine different prizes. They draw tens of thousands of numbers from a huge drum, and each one wins a different prize.

The whole draw takes place on TV, and all of Spain is gripped with excitement, for HOURS!

It’s like some weird mass hypnosis voodoo or something.

Strictly Limited Ticket Supply

You can’t pick your numbers with this draw. You can only buy pre-printed tickets. Which means this once a year draw has a limited supply of tickets – by design.

Once they are sold out, that is it.

A large chunk are reserved by Spanish families – some numbers you just cannot ever buy. Seriously!

So if you want to play, now is the time.

I’ve only played this one for the last 2 draws. Last year I found a better supplier which was way cheaper, and I won and got paid a few small prizes.

I’m using the same guys again this year for El Gordo. I reckon the only way to get better value is if you live in Spain! So you can do a LOT worse than play with these guys.

See you in the big draw .

If you don’t live in Spain you’ve probably never seen this video:-

(And yup, that’s how it goes for HOURS..! Every prize and every winning number is drawn – then sung out by kids from the local school. All of Spain is gripped the whole way through.)

El Gordo is the massive once a year Christmas lottery draw – it has a ridiculous prize fund of BILLIONS.

Here’s why I like it though:-

It pays out thousands of big prizes NOT crazy amounts to just a few people. And that means much better chances of winning a big prize – because there are so many more of them. Not to mention the HUGE volume of smaller prizes too.

Makes sense right? (Try telling the folks who run US Mega Millions…)

You have to be careful where you buy tickets for El Gordo though – a lot of online places will charge you stupid amounts.

(I played with these guys last year – good service, decent price, won a few small prizes and got paid promptly – so I’m playing with them again this year).

Bet your country has nothing like this for a lottery draw..?

[Q] Should I play lottery numbers that have a higher frequency of being drawn?

[A] There are lots of interesting things you can do with old lottery results. You can apply all sorts of analysis on past results, and come up with lots of intriguing things.

Even the lottery companies do it themselves. Many official lottery sites have things like lottery frequency checker tools on them, so you can see how often each ball has been drawn.

But the problem with this kind of analysis, is that it’s entirely useless in predicting what’s going to happen next.

Here’s why…

Lottery Randomness Looks Weird

I know this sounds a bit Douglas Adams but the big problem with randomness is that it can often look so very unrandom.

For something to be truly random, all results have to be possible.

So for there to be any significance in some numbers appearing more often than others, there must by definition be something wrong with the draw process. In others words it isn’t random.

Yes, that’s theoretically possible – but bear in mind lottery companies put an awful lot of effort into ensuring their draws are random.

By all means fire up your Excel spreadsheet, plug in all the past results, and make charts of hit frequency. If you find that kind of stuff fun.

(No offence intended – I’m a maths and probability geek!)

But please don’t be fooled into thinking this kind of analysis will increase your chances of winning the lottery.

It won’t do your chances of winning any harm to play this way, it just won’t improve them any either.

For more help with winning and real stuff you can do to improve your odds, get my free lottery tips course.

Just when you need reality to back up your facts. I thank you Bulgaria

Every day I see another crazy claim about how certain results can never happen on the lottery. Or how you can avoid unlikely combinations, and other such total rubbish.

Well stick this story in your pipe and smoke it all you sellers of those crazy lottery systems!

Same Six Numbers Two Lottery Draws In A Row

On 6th September the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 were drawn on the Bulgaria lottery.

Then, the very next draw on 10th September exactly the same numbers were drawn again!

Eeeek! Impossible craziness right?

But the draw was live on Bulgarian TV. And it wasn’t one of those computer based draws, it was a normal lottery draw machine with balls tumbling around in a drum.

So did Derrren Brown fix the result? Is it some mass conspiracy to undermine trust in the Bulgarian lottery? Have aliens landed and taken over Bulgaria?

No. No. And probably not.

So How Can This Happen?

Let’s flip the question and look at it this way.

If it was impossible for the previous numbers to be drawn again, would that be a truly random lottery draw? If number 4 was less likely to come out because it appeared last time, would that really be random?

Think carefully here.

Randomness can look very odd sometimes. Especially to our highly ordered, pattern loving brains.

The truth is that it’s perfectly normal for things like this to happen when something is totally random.

It is theoretically possible there is something very wrong with the set of balls used. But a lot of checks and measures would have to fail for that to be the case.

Yes, Svilen  Neykov (Sports Minister) was right to order a review. But don’t be at all surprised to find the review finds nothing at all out of the ordinary.

What Can We Take Away From This?

If you look hard enough for patterns in past results, you will find them. But analysing past results will not help you predict lottery numbers.

(If you enjoy analysing lottery results and playing around with spreadsheets, that’s cool with me. I quite like a spreadsheet myself. But please try and avoid jumping to the wrong conclusion and making claims that simply aren’t true.)

UPDATE: The commission concluded their investigation and found no evidence of fraud or manipulation, and no wrongdoing. Surprise!