As anyone familiar with South Africa is all too aware: South Africans are lottery mad. Since first being launched in the early 2000s, the lottery has been a huge draw in South Africa.
The first official lottery was the South African National Lottery, which was launched in 2002. As a sign of things to come, around R70m worth of tickets were sold.
With various game types, variations and prize pools on offer, the lottery is an important weekly event in the lives of many South Africans. With local, national and international lottery prize pools on offer, there are now more lottery players in South Africa than ever.
Although various online betting platforms are challenging the dominance the lottery has had for quite some time, the traditional lottery is still proving popular; with an estimated 82% of the country participating in the various bi-weekly lottery draws on offer.
In fact, the South African lottery is so popular it even managed to make international news recently when one particularly suspicious lottery draw resulted in a national fraud investigation.
However, of the various lottery options South Africans now have available to them, the Sportstake is one variation that is proving to be increasingly popular. Much of this popularity has to do with the fact that it combines two of the great passions of South Africans: the lottery and sports.
What exactly is the Sportstake, and how do I play it? For a quick run-down of what it is, read playcasino’s guide on how to play Sportstake 13 & other betting tips!
Sportstake 13
The Sportstake draw gives you the chance to win prizes by predicting the results of various soccer matches from around the world. There are two variations of this: Sportstake 13 and Sportstake 8. The former requires you to correctly guess the outcome of 13 football games, while the latter requires you to predict eight.
These predictions need to be made on the outcome of a variety of soccer games from different leagues across the world. This could include the English Premier League, the Bundesliga in Germany, the European Champions League, La Lige in Spain or AFCON.
Each week, a fixture list will get published. One of these will be published on a Thursday for the fixtures due to be held on the upcoming weekend, while the fixtures for midweek games will be published on a Sunday.
To win a prize, you need to correctly guess the outcome of at least ten games. If you want to win the top prize on offer, however, you will need to correctly guess all thirteen. To make life a little easier, you only need to predict whether it will be an away team win, a home team win or a draw. This means you do not need to predict the exact score.
While this might sound like a relatively easy feat — particularly if you have deep knowledge of the game — it is notoriously difficult to crack. Part of what makes it so difficult is that you have to make between ten to thirteen correct predictions, which is by no means an easy task.
How to play Sportstake 13?
Signing up to play the Sportstake 13 is a relatively simple process. To lock in your wager, simply enter your predictions at least 30 minutes before the start of the first fixture on the list. This can be done in-person in an authorised store, or online via a betting platform.
Once you are logged in, you can then choose your prediction for each match. Mark the appropriate box with a ‘1’ to predict a win for the home team, an ‘X’ for a draw or a ‘2’ to predict a win for the away team. Do this for all three boards on the coupon you have been issued. You will then be required to pay for your entry, with each valid entry costing around R2.
If you want to make more than one prediction on each fixture, this will cost you an additional R2 for each wager. You can also sometimes choose a ‘Propick’ option, which essentially fills in the fixture list for you. These selections are based on previous match data and statistics and also partially randomised.
What can I win?
The Sportstake 13 draw works on a prize pool basis. Which means that the prize pool for the Sportstake is made up of 50% of all the money raised from the ticket sales.
This means that while there are no fixed prizes each week, the prize pools can potentially be very significant depending on the week. If no one wins the top prize on any given week by making thirteen correct predictions, the prize pool will roll over until the next week. The prize pool will also be shared between four tiers of winners, with 13 correct predictions being the highest tier and 10 correct predictions being the lowest.
