Lottery Syndicates
A lottery syndicate is a group of people who team up to buy tickets together. Playing in a syndicate allows you to share the cost of entering games with others, making the idea of submitting multiple tickets more appealing as it is much more affordable. If you have more entries, it increases your chances of winning. Find out more about lotto syndicates.
How Syndicates Work
You can set up a lottery syndicate with anyone you like, as long as you are all over the age of 18. It may be that you decide to join forces with a few family members, friends, neighbours or work mates.
Even if you can’t round up people you know to play together, you can still join a syndicate that has already been set up in-store and go in on a ticket with fellow members of the local community. You purchase shares in a syndicate, so you just need to ask in-store what shares are available for the game of your choice. If you’ve got a Lottery Card, make sure to buy your entry with it so that any prizes you win will be automatically paid out to it.
Syndicates are available for Weekday Windfall, Saturday Lotto, plus Oz Lotto and Powerball. If you wish to play another game in a syndicate, you will have to create your own syndicate agreement as you won’t find the option in-store.
You can choose to play a standard marked entry, Quick Pick, System entry, Pick entry or, for Powerball, a PowerHit.
The cost of playing System entries and Pick entries, in particular, can quickly build up, so joining a syndicate is a great way to keep expenses down. If your group wins a prize, it will be split equally between all the members.
Syndicate Agreements
If you’re setting up your own syndicate, you should make sure that a few key points are agreed before you play. This helps to resolve any disputes that may arise further down the line. A few suggestions are shown below:
- A list of everyone in the syndicate
- Details of the tickets that will be bought - the numbers you will play, how many entries, which game, etc
- How much each member has to pay and when their stake is due
- How winnings will be distributed between the group
- A clear action plan for what happens if someone doesn’t pay their stake on time
- Whether or not you will go public or stay anonymous if you win
You should make sure that everyone in the group signs your agreement, and also appoint a syndicate manager. It is the syndicate manager’s responsibility to collect everyone’s stake, buy tickets on time, check the results and pay out winnings.
Syndicate Winners
Playing in a syndicate is popular in Australia and an effective method of boosting your odds, so it is no surprise that many big jackpots have been won by groups. Find out about some previous syndicate winners:
- Back in December 2013, this draw set a new record for the biggest lottery win on a single ticket in Australia. It was for an Oz Lotto jackpot worth $70 and the entry belonged to a syndicate of friends from the Gold Coast in Queensland. They were all women and they regularly lunched together, using any leftover change to play the lottery. They had just eaten out in Runaway Bay when they purchased a 12-game Quick Pick, and matched all the numbers to instantly become multimillionaires.
- A syndicate of 15 biscuit factory workers landed a share of a $70 million Powerball jackpot in August 2014. There was only one other winning ticket, so they split $35 million, which worked out at $2.4 million each. One member of the group said: “There are mortgages to pay off, retirement plans down the track and a few people have said they’ll be donating some of their prize money to charity. No one will be out shopping for a Lamborghini today!”
- In May 2014, a syndicate of 16 workers at a Toyota factory in Altona, Victoria won $15 million on Oz Lotto. The plant was set to close down three years later, but the lucky winners were left with no financial worries for the future. Aged in their 30s to 50s, they were even generous enough to share their winnings with a factory worker who had recently opted out of the weekly syndicate.
- When a Saturday Lotto Superdraw in June 2020 created 27 winners, it turned out one of the tickets belonged to an 89-strong syndicate. The group had played a System 17 entry and also won 66 times in Division 3, as well as 825 times in Division 4, boosting their total winnings to more than $810,000. Jeff Chan, owner of the 888 Lotto Lidcombe store which established the syndicate, said: “It’s very impressive so many people won. Not just in this syndicate with 89 members, but with 27 division one winning entries in total - it’s remarkable. We’ve had this syndicate going for a while now, and I always think that a syndicate entry has a good chance to win division one because it’s a bigger entry with more numbers.”
