Auto Draws
How our automatic draws work
Most of our competitions are drawn live on Instagram. Our smaller and faster competitions are drawn automatically instead, by our system, at the exact moment the countdown ends.
Everything else stays the same. Fixed ticket numbers, a skill question to qualify, a guaranteed winner, and a published list of every entry so you can check the result for yourself. The only difference is that nobody is standing in front of a camera.
Competitions drawn this way are clearly marked as an auto draw on the competition page. If a competition is not marked as an auto draw, it is drawn live.
When the draw happens
- • At the closing date and time shown on the competition page.
- • Or immediately, if every ticket sells out before then.
- • A winner is drawn either way. The draw does not depend on selling every ticket.
The order of events
When the countdown reaches zero, three things happen in this order.
- Ticket sales close and the full entry list is published on the website.
- We wait 90 seconds. This lets any payment that was already going through at the closing moment finish and receive its ticket numbers.
- The winning ticket is selected and published.
That 90 second gap is deliberate. It means the complete list of entries is public and searchable before anybody, including us, knows who has won.
How the winner is selected
Every ticket sold gets one place in the draw. If you bought ten tickets you have ten places, and ten times the chance of the person who bought one.
The winning ticket is chosen using a cryptographically secure random number generator, the same class of randomness used to protect online banking and encryption. It is not a simple software shuffle and it cannot be predicted, influenced or repeated.
The exact time of the draw is recorded to the second and displayed on the entry list, alongside the winning ticket number and the total number of tickets in the draw.
Once a winner has been selected it is written permanently and cannot be redrawn. No entry can be added, changed or removed after a draw has taken place.
Checking your entry
Every auto draw competition has a public entry list, linked from the competition page. It shows every ticket in the draw, in order, with the order reference and the name on the order.
You can search it by name or by ticket number. Your ticket numbers are on your confirmation email. The order reference groups together every ticket bought in the same purchase, so a bundle appears as one order across several rows. Once the draw has run, the winning ticket is pinned at the top of the list.
The list is published when the competition closes and stays online afterwards, so the result can be checked at any time.
Privacy on the entry list
The entry list shows the name given at checkout, the ticket number and an order reference. It never shows email addresses, phone numbers, addresses or the amount anyone spent.
Where no name was given at checkout, the entry appears with the first three characters of the email address followed by asterisks, so the entrant can still identify their own row without being identifiable to anyone else.
Compliance
- • Auto draw competitions are prize competitions under Section 14 of the Gambling Act 2005, exactly like our live draws. They are not a lottery and not gambling.
- • Every entry requires a correct answer to the competition skill question before checkout can be completed. Skill qualifies the entrant, and only then is chance used to select from those who qualified.
- • All entrants must be 18 or over and resident in the United Kingdom.
- • A winner is guaranteed on the published draw date regardless of how many tickets have sold. This means the draw will always take place. It does not mean every entrant wins.
If you win
We contact the winner using the details given at checkout. Where a cash alternative is offered on the competition page, it is always available as an option and the choice is yours.
It is your responsibility to keep your contact details up to date. If we cannot reach a winner, we will keep trying using every detail we hold before taking any further step.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you want us to walk you through a specific result, email hello@thecompclub.co.uk and we will talk you through it.
Best prizes. Best odds. Built on transparency.