Well, okay, not quite the whole thing. But I did win 55 euros, which ain’t bad. Actually, I’m not really the lotto-player type. But my father-in-law plays it religiously (when it’s over a million he plays the same numbers), and he buys tickets for my wife and I, and now our daughter too. Which brings me to the point of this blog — the lotto.ie website.

So knowing very little about the lotto or how it works, I’m a good test case for how well things are explained. The first thing is the (winning) ticket itself. Here it is below:

Since I didn’t buy the ticket myself, I’m always confused by the Plus thing. So I go on the website to figure out if I won. And the first thing you have to do is figure out which lotto you played.

To me it looks like three separate Lotto results, so when I look back at my ticket I’m not sure which one is for me. I want my ticket to match the results, so it should say Lotto, Lotto Plus 1, or Lotto Plus 2. And the way the ticket is written, with “Lotto Plus” on one line and “No” on the second, it makes me wonder for a bit.

So eventually I figure out that it’s telling me I didn’t play either of those Plus games. But shouldn’t this require zero thought to figure out?.

It turns out you only play the Lotto Plus or you don’t — there aren’t three separate games. So now the “NO” phrase makes a bit more sense. But surely they could make this more clear. Maybe group the Lotto Plus results together on the web page. And have my ticket just say “Lotto”, or it could say:

Lotto

(no Plus)

As is often the case, small details can make a big difference.

Nifty widget?

The site does have a nice little widget to check your numbers.

The problem with it is if, like me, you have three Pick 5 tickets to check, you have to enter 15 sets of 6 numbers, which once you start typing them in, you realise is far too much of a pain. I suppose the widget is handy if you play one set of numbers all the time.

The site makes it very easy to find the numbers from previous results, and so I just manually checked those. And wihoo!! I actually won. It wasn’t nearly exciting as I expected, probably because checking lotto results feels like such a chore. But hey, 55 bucks is a tidy little sum.

Where do I get my cash?

The site doesn’t tell me! I swear, I looked for several minutes and couldn’t’ find it. I was convinced I was just missing it, because it’s such an obvious thing to put on the site. But even now, I still can’t find it. It is however, written on the back of the ticket (in tiny print of course, but when you win, you’re happy to read tiny print).

Hmmm, maybe that’s a subtle message from the folks at lotto — so few people win these things that we needn’t bother explaining what to do if you do win.