Halted £1million Home raffle in Devon?

The gaming commission comes down on property raffles.

It’s hard not to have read the many articles on  the £1 million property that was put up for raffle by a couple in Devon. If you haven’t read about it, a couple trying to beat the credit crunch put up their home for competition, managing to sell 46000 tickets at £25 each. The winner of the competition would win the house. Recently the Gaming Commission halted the draw…  you can read all about on the BBC website Here.

People do not necessarely understand the difference between a raffle, a prize draw and a lottery. The Gaming Act of 2005 that took effect at the end of 2007, clearly draws the line between competitions, draws and lotteries. The case of the Devon property would appear to fall a bit too close to the guidelines that make it a lottery.

Running a competition of skill needs to comply with the many guidelines from the Gambling Act of 2005 and the guidelines issued by the Gaming Commission. The big issue is requiring payment to enter. Raffles and prizes draws have to be free to enter, as soon as you charge to enter a raffle or prize draw you risk falling into the category of a lottery which is strictly banned by the Gaming Act of 2005.

In order to put up a competition to win a home, you need to operate a competition of skill that both follows the guidelines of “restricting a significant amount of people to enter” and remove a significant amount of luck. As well, in order to be a competition of skill, the exercise of that skill needs to be measured against a panel of professionals.

For these reasons, Spotit.co.uk invested significant amounts to develop a competition platform that structures the competition of skill process and pairs entrants to the comeptitions to real professional football referees. Granted it is significantly more expensive and complicated, but it signigicantly reduces the luck component of the skill based competition. In the Spot the ball process against professional referees there is no random number generation, not lottery picking of the winner. It is all based around a rational  and structured process of you versus the pros.

Perhaps it is the end of home raffles as we have seem them and it’s time that professional websites that have used legal counsel to structure it’s winner process support the win a home raffles and turn them into real competitions of skill.