Thai lotto is one of two legal gambling activities allowed in Thailand (the other being horse racing in Bangkok), and it is an enormous business with around 70 million Thais taking part. Draws take place twice monthly on the 1st and 16th days, and results are broadcast over TV and radio. Many Thais take their chances in this national lottery seriously, employing various strategies such as praying to banana trees or dream interpretation, visiting shrines for guidance or consulting fortune tellers to increase their odds. Others simply hope their lucky numbers appear next time around!
Dreams or nightmares that include numbers you find unnerved you might seem like an effective strategy for winning the lottery, but it would probably be wiser to avoid those associated with tragic accidents or natural disasters. Some punters have even been known to search license plate numbers from crashed cars or highway numbers where accidents happened in order to better their odds at playing lotteries.
Government Lottery Office (GLO) runs the official lottery in Thailand, selling tickets in all major stores, online, post offices and airports. However, gambling remains illegal under Thai law but an underground network with an estimated size that rivals that of official lotteries exists and continues to thrive despite these attempts to crack it down; many Thais gamble through such illegal operators that cannot easily be detected and controlled despite them technically being illegal and hard to eradicate from Thai society.
Prizes in Thai lotto are determined by how many correct digits appear on a winning ticket, beginning with matching six, followed by five and then four correct digits in any order – with any sixth and final correct digit awarding an extra bonus prize – previously GLO also offered an additional jackpot prize for getting these last two in correct order; this was discontinued last year.
Alongside the main jackpot prize is also two smaller ones: B5 million as the 2nd prize and B2 million for 3rd. There’s also an option of receiving an extra prize if all six digits in your ticket match correctly; then, B30 million can be yours!
The draw chairman selects a colored ball at random to determine the order of lesser prize draws and their four colors indicate different categories; for instance, yellow indicates second prize draws while pink signifies third, green fourth and blue fifth prizes have their two-digit winners drawn randomly before one six-digit number is selected as winner for main jackpot prize draws.