As we’ve said multiple times before, it’s important to understand that you need to enter competitions regularly if you want to be in with a good shot at winning prizes.
In a nutshell, the logic is that the chance of winning any one contest is small – very small in the case of TV competitions.
Does that mean that they’re not worth entering though? That’s something that’s up for debate, and largely depends on your attitude to effort.
The Case Against Entering Popular Competitions
The bigger the competition promotion, the more entries they’re likely to attract. Let’s talk in terms of the biggest promoters to illustrate our point, so ITV spring to mind as the obvious example.
To my knowledge, the biggest prize they’ve ever offered was £1.2 million back in 2021.
They only actually ended up giving away a prize worth a million pounds (only!), because the winner got to choose between a million pounds immediately or £10,000 a month for 12 years – that’s 120 installments totalling a cool £1,200,000.
As a side note, I’d have done exactly the same thing – seeing a million quid land in the bank must have been quite an exciting event.
While competition prizes are tax free in the UK, the interest on it isn’t, so there was an argument for taking the funds monthly. In my opinion though, a good investment plan would get an awful lot of interest on that million pound deposit over the ten years the installment option would take to pay out.
Anyway, just like last time, I’m drifting from the topic.
What I was trying to get to was the point that to give away so much money, you need a lot of £2 entries. Half a million in fact just to break even.
Such rough and ready maths shows that the odds are heavily stacked against an individual entry, and are going to be way worse as ITV will have a lot of costs beyond the prize itself.
Many compers will therefore argue that entering a huge competition like that isnt worth the time or money. I agree it’s not worth the money – but the time? I’m not so sure.
Why I Would (And Do!) Enter These Massive Cash Prize Draws
Let’s continue on that last point first. You don’t have to pay the £2 to enter. Yes – you heard that right – I very rarely pay to enter an ITV draw. More on the nuance of that shortly.
I enter these competitions by post. While the detail is all on the ITV website, other place on the web so a far better job of explaining things that I could ever do.
I had the pleasure of meeting Charlotte from Competitions.TV after a chance exchange of messages on Facebook when I spotted an error on her page on the social network.
She’s got an excellent database of information on all of the TV shows on ITV, so for example, if you want to see how to enter the Good Morning Britain competition, she’s got a detailed run down .
Of course, the same goes with all of the big shows, but the same point follows.
The key message is that to enter by post, you get exactly the same chance of winning as you would with a phone call or online entry, but it only costs you a stamp to post your entry in to ITV.
Admittedly, stamps feel expensive these days, but it won’t cost you £2 to enter.
These types of tricks (or hacks as the Instagram and TikTok kids call them) are what tip the balance towards you and away from other entrants – you’re doing the same thing with less cost. I did initially type investment, but cost is a much better description.
As a result, you can (over time) enter more competitions to get more entries than others do with the same cost to enter.
Another Trick – You’re Welcome!
As an aside, there’s an even better way to get into the draws for free with ITV, and that’s to collect Winsday Tickets with their video feed.
You watch a mind numbingly irritating stream of ads on their website and click the tickets as they appear.
In a week, you’re allowed to collect 6 tickets into a draw that runs once a week, and each Wednesday afternoon you can check them to see if you’ve won.
Prizes include cash, tokens to enter smaller competitions on their site, and most importantly (for this article) a credit to enter one of the big competitions on their site for free.
If you regularly complete the Winsday entries you can save them up and get extra free entries too when they offer bundles of entries.
So, to conclude, entering massive competitions can definitely form a part of a comper’s strategy – they won’t help your odds much, but if you do fall lucky, the reward is truly massive. Just make sure you enter a ton of other competitions too – the more the better, but don’t pay for too many of them as the entry fees quickly stack up.