Most people have a vague sense that prize draws and lotteries have bad odds. But how bad? And how do you even know with most competition sites? Let's walk through the numbers.
Odds of winning jackpot
1 in 45,057,474
Ticket cost
£2
To put 1 in 45 million in perspective: you're more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 1.2 million) than to win the Lotto jackpot. You'd need to buy a ticket every week for 866,000 years to have a statistical expectation of winning once.
Typical odds
1 in 10,000+
Entry cost
£1-5
Better than the lottery, but still not great — and that's when you can figure it out at all. Most competition sites sell unlimited entries and never publish the total. The popular prizes get worse, quietly, the nearer you get to the draw.
Exact entry count
Published
Before every draw closes
Monthly cost
£10
We don't pretend to know your odds in advance because we're not a fixed-size lottery. What we guarantee is something better: you will know the exact entry count before the draw closes, so your maths is never a mystery.
In practice that means early-stage draws typically settle in the low thousands of entries. If you hold 10 entries in a pool of 2,500, your odds are 1 in 250. If it's 5,000, it's 1 in 500. Either way: you see the number, you do the sum, you decide.
By comparison, the National Lottery jackpot is roughly 15,000 times worse than a typical Keystone draw — and most competition sites will never tell you the pool size at all.
| Lottery | Typical Comp | Keystone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Odds | 1 in 45M | 1 in 10K+ | Typically < 1 in 1K |
| Entry count disclosed | Yes | Rarely | Always, before close |
| Cost/year | £104 | £50-500 | £170 |
| Prize value | Variable | £1-50K | £3.5-10K/month |
| Live draw | TV | Sometimes | Every time |
The whole point is that your odds stop being a mystery. When an entry count is hidden, the operator has every incentive to sell more and tell you less. When it's published, the incentive flips — we have to keep the prizes worth it at the pool size we actually have.
We publish the running entry count in the run-up to every close. You can verify it, do your own maths, and make a decision. That's what transparency looks like.