Daily Lotto for Beginners

Daily Lotto is an exciting new lottery game from the Ithuba National Lottery. The game was started only on March 10, 2019, and offers a fresh new take on the extremely popular Lotto game in South Africa. One bet at the Daily Lotto costs just R3 and you can play an unlimited number of times. The best part of it all is that there is no carryover – if nobody wins the jackpot, the cash prize is divided between the other lower-level winners!

The odds of winning a prize in the Daily Lotto are very high, with Ithuba estimating a 7 in 1 chance. And true to its name, the Lotto prizes are awarded every single day at 9 PM. If you hate waiting for days for the prize draw, the Daily Lotto is perfect for you! Regulated by the National Lottery Commission, Daily Lotto is a legal and safe way to bet and win cash in South Africa.

Check Results

If you have decided to play Daily Lotto, you need to understand the basic rules. Thankfully, they are not at all complicated. Each lotto slip has numbers from 1 to 36. Your job is to pick any five numbers. If you get any matching numbers in the daily draw, you win a cash prize. The more matching numbers you have, the higher your prize! Here is a quick look at the prize structure in Daily Lotto:

Division 1 – all 5 correct numbers – win 35.60% of the total prize fund
Division 2 – 4 correct numbers – 8.20% of the prize fund
Division 3 – 3 correct numbers – 16.40% of the prize fund
Division 4 – 2 correct numbers – 39.40% of the prize fund

As you can see, to win anything, you need to get at least 2 numbers correct out of the five you pick. The actual amount of price you will win will vary depending upon the number of players who get the winning numbers.

Daily Lotto slips can be bought at any licensed Lottery retailed across South Africa. There is also the option to buy Daily Lotto online, which we will explain in another section below. You can also check out our guide to the best lottery sites to find out where to buy online.  If you are buying from an offline retailer shop, you have to correctly follow these steps:

• Get an original Daily Lotto bet slip available at a licensed retailer.
• Mark your 5 numbers using a pen or pencil
• Give the teller your slip and make a payment of R3.
• Receive a receipt and check the numbers to make sure they are correct.
• Don’t forget to write your name on the back of the slip!
• Check the results every night at 9 PM, at the shop or online.

If you don’t want to spend time marking the numbers manually on the slip, you have a few other options as well:

• As the retailer enter the numbers you choose directly into the machine.
• Ask for a Quick Pick option where five random numbers are assigned to you.

You can increase your odds of winning a prize by entering in multiple bet slips. There is no limit to the number of times you can play this lotto. You are free to pick multiple combinations of five different numbers. There is also the option to use the same numbers for several draws. The bet slip has a Multi-Draw section where you can opt to do this. There is a maximum betting limit of R150 per bet slip, per player, according to Ithuba National Lottery.

As usual, the game is for adults only and you have to be 18+ to be able to play this game. Lotto is largely a game of chance or pure luck. The winning numbers are selected by a random number generator. The odds of winning the Match 5 jackpot are 1 in 376,992. With those kinds of odds, there is very little strategy involved. You could try to spread the numbers apart, including both even and odd numbers, to increase your chances a tiny bit.

Since Daily Lotto offers guaranteed prizes every day, the National Lottery has managed to keep prices on the lower side. South African players will be delighted to know that they only need to spend R3 to place a single bet at Daily Lotto. Since that includes the VAT, it is a very nominal amount, considering the cost of some other lottery tickets out there.

Besides retail shops, Ithuba allows you to buy Daily Lotto tickets online through their website and mobile app. So if you want to buy a Daily Lotto from the comfort of your home or office, that option is available to you! To avail this feature, you will have to register at the Ithuba website, or in the app if you are doing it from your mobile phone.

You can use your name and ID number to create a new Ithuba account and virtual wallet. After signing up, you have to access your account and deposit funds in your wallet. You can then bet on Daily Lotto online using these funds. You can also use the USSD method if you want to select the five numbers through SMS on your mobile phone. Just like at a retail shop, both manual and quick draw features are available online as well.

Daily Lotto is different from other jackpot Lotto games. It does not have a Rollover feature. This means that if there is no jackpot winner, the winning prize money is not transferred to the next draw. In Daily Lotto, all the winnings are paid out every night at 9 PM itself.

This is good news for lower-ranked winners. If nobody gets 5 numbers correct, the 35% prize allocation for that level is added to the second level (match 4). For example, in the first and second Daily Lotto draws on March 10 and 11, there were no jackpot winners. So the Division 2 winners who got 4 numbers correct won around a couple of thousand Rands each.

In contrast, on the third draw on March 12, the Division 2 winners got only R365 because there was a jackpot winner who pocketed a cool R215,000! So you see, the prize structure in Daily Lotto is not very rigid. This means that you can win anywhere from a couple of Rands to a few hundred thousand, depending on your luck of course.

Daily Lotto does not promise huge jackpots that make you a millionaire overnight. But with an average chance of 1 in 7, this quick-paying lotto is great for players who are looking to play on a daily basis and win smaller prizes.

The National Lottery System was inaugurated in South Africa in the year 2000. The right to operate this lottery is awarded to companies through a periodic bidding process. Ithuba won the bidding process in 2015, replacing Gidani as the National Lottery operator in South Africa. Ithuba runs Powerball and various lotto games in South Africa, along with innovative scratch cards like EAZiWIN. They also run sports betting in the country. Ithuba also makes a positive impact on South African society by donating part of its profits (34%) to charity. Beyond the national lottery, there are also many international lotteries that can be played from South Africa.