Lottery Online is the most popular lottery in Thailand, with a daily prize pool of over 1 billion baht. It is available at more than 24,000 lottery shops throughout the country, as well as on the internet and mobile phone. Lottery Online is operated by the Government Lottery Office, with headquarters in Bangkok and a branch in Chiang Mai. It is one of only two forms of legal gambling in the country.
The game is simple: Participants purchase tickets, pinning their hopes on a sequence of numbers. If the numbers in their ticket match those in a random draw, they win. Lottery results are announced every first and sixteenth of the month. The game is a significant source of revenue for organizers, an entertainment source for the public, and a stimulator of the economy through windfall winnings that are re-injected into spending.
Thai lottery tickets are pre-printed and include a variety of anti-counterfeiting features, with each individual ticket sold in a “ticket pair.” A guest known as the “Draw Chairman” randomly selects balls (numbers) to initialize each draw machine. During the drawing, the winning numbers are announced along with the bonus prize number.
The odds of winning the grand prize are relatively low. The chances of a player hitting all six digits in the correct order are approximately one in 19 million. The first prize is B2 million, with additional prizes of B40,000 for each of the other five digits in the correct order. The bonus prize was a higher amount, but this has been scrapped since the military government took power in 2014. The game is popular among expats living in Thailand and abroad, who are attracted by the bi-monthly draws, high jackpot amounts, and credit purchases.
