Comping
My dad is a semi-retired "comper" - someone who goes around finding all the competitions on leaflets in stores and entering them.

From memory he's won several TVs, several hifis, a gold coin, various CDs, various vouchers / small cash prizes, a trip to New Zealand, a car and innumerable crappy runners up prizes like branded baseball hats, pens etc.. Crappest prize I can recall him winning was a pond pump but since he had a pond I suppose it wasn't.

Comping infected me too. I won £1000 after A levels by entering some Barclays competition for school leavers. Had to endure a lunch with the bank manager and my smarmy cunt headmaster but it was worth it for the cash. A garden patio heater. A widescreen TV & DVD player. A £1000 of gift vouchers for Easons (Irish WHSmiths basically). A suitcase. A trip to Venice and a few smaller things.

My most useless prizes were probably the lawnmower I won for guessing the weight of a lawnmower. It didn't prove much use for someone living in student digs at the time. I also wrote into a BBC radio quiz and won Dr Norton's Antivirus which was great except I didn't have a PC. This'll give you a clue how long ago we're talking about winning this - the prize was on 5"1/4 floppy disks.

Regrettably the trend these days are stupid free draws usually via SMS. No skill required and miniscule odds of winning something worth winning. I suppose companies find it too much effort to sort through a pile of post and judge entries when they can let a computer handle everything.
(MagicMoose, Sat 30 Apr 2011, 10:09, 6 replies)

'scuse me ignorance
But what was the skill involved before SMS? Surely it was either just filling out your details and posting them off or answering a ridiculously easy question and doing the same?
(MJPerry was crude but clickable at, Sat 30 Apr 2011, 14:50, closed)

Tiebreakers
Most competitions have a couple of questions and a tiebreaker, e.g. "I want to win a trip to New York with McVities because..." in 10 words or less. The questions filter out the idiots but then there might be 500 qualifying entries for 1 top prize and 50 runners up.

So it's critical to make the tiebreaker as witty and clever as possible. Puns work pretty well. People who write something like "because I like biscuits", or "because I want to go to New York" may well not have bothered.

Take time to make the tiebreaker work and you stand a very good chance of winning.
(MagicMoose, Sat 30 Apr 2011, 17:48, closed)

Wrong! nobody actually reads those tiebreakers!
They are just there so that the organisers can say that the competition is not a lottery (under Section 27 or 28 of the Gaming and Lotteries Act 1956 permission from a Garda Superintendent to run a lottery but this is not required for something which requires skill)

Those sms competitions normally include a trivia question such as What is 1+1?

A. 4
B. 2
C. Spongebob squarepants
(tubeman trousers, Sat 30 Apr 2011, 18:04, closed)

Well you tell me why we won so much
Most companies that run competitions do judge the tiebreaker. They even print the winning tiebreakers so you can see their quality. The fact that both of us won so much should demonstrate the point. My dad was even a member of comper clubs where other people had similar hauls. Basically if you put in the effort you won more.

If it weren't the case my dad and I wouldn't have won nearly as much.

As for ring-in / SMS competitions I don't know the rules at present but it used to be the case that a random draw had to free which is why some of them say "no purchase necessary". Usually to enter without purchasing is made quite inconvenient but it can still be done. But some draws dodge the issue by issuing a question with an obvious answer so they can pretend it is a game of skill and therefore charge a fee for entering, e.g. what colour is Kermit the Frog a) Green, b) Gold, c) Invisible.
(MagicMoose, Sat 30 Apr 2011, 21:14, closed)

The reason for the SMS trend is down to money
Why shell out for prizes as per the old days if the quiz itself will generate enough income to pay for them and make a nice little profit at the same time?

You just have to make sure there's an element of "skill" to stop it being a lottery and keep it *just* this side of legal. The law, aftr all, doesn't say how hard the questions have to be.
(dxg, Sat 30 Apr 2011, 19:33, closed)

Well quite
Day time TV is filled with brain dead phone quizes where people are asked is New York nicknamed A) The hairy arsehole, B) I will kill you all or C) The Big Apple. No skill at all but the question exists to justify charging idiots £2 per message, 8 messages minimum to enter a "competition" which is basically a random draw.

That said most household brands run competitions / draws in good faith. You pay the network rate for an SMS competition or the price of a postage stamp. I guess they run the competitions as a promotion not as an excuse to profit from idiots.

Anyway, I realize things have changed a lot which is a shame given the amount of stuff I won in the old model.
(MagicMoose, Sat 30 Apr 2011, 21:19, closed)