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At the time of writing, the Melbourne Cup is right around the corner. This is pretty much Australia’s biggest horse race, and it is scheduled to be held on November 1st, 2022. For those who haven’t got a calendar in front of them – that’s Tuesday next week! And as you’ve no doubt gathered by the title, we shall be discussing how to run a Melbourne Cup sweepstakes competition from wherever you are based.
Of course, the idea of sweepstakes is to allow everyone to get in on the action, without needing any direct experience with the sport or the event. Yes, sweepstakes are loosely based on betting, yet they do not function in the same way that traditional bets might. Because of this, we figured it’s important to firstly describe in further detail what a sweepstake involves. Then we shall get to highlighting what would be done to run a Melbourne Cup sweepstake. Let’s get started.
Melbourne Cup Sweepstakes – how it actually works
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Okay, so before we talk about the sweepstakes relating to the event itself, let’s detail what a sweepstake is and how it works. In regular betting, as you may or may not know, you would choose a winner of whatever event you are betting on. This is usually run for a competition, much like the Melbourne Cup. And essentially, you would gather ‘fees’ from a group of people in order to create your own sweepstakes event.
For the Melbourne Cup, as an example, you could get 24 people involved in the group. We say this because there are 24 horses running in the race. Anyway, the idea is that you gather fees through a group, and then you can go ahead and process all of the wagers on the event in question. For the Melbourne Cup, this would involve 24 individual wagers on each of the participants in the race. The final part of the sweepstakes would be to draw horses out of a hat between the 24 sweepstakes entrants.
This determines which horse they would have effectively bet on. And when all is said and done, the total payout from the winning bets is then split between a set number of people. You could run sweepstakes in your family (if it’s big enough), school, work environment, or whatever other groups you may be involved in to do the sweepstakes.
Step-by-step on running your own Melbourne Cup sweepstakes
Now that you have an understanding of how to run sweepstakes, you can go ahead and set one up if you have the time to do so. Further to the information on this style of group betting above, let us break things down into the necessary steps before this race begins.
Gather your group and collect fees
To keep things as straightforward as possible for your Melbourne Cup sweepstakes, as mentioned above, we suggest gathering a group of 24 people. If you are unable to secure a group of 24, however, you could gather a group of 12 or even 6 people. As you can see, these are all multiples that would go into 24, with 24 being the number of horses due to race. So if you gathered 24 people, each individual could get one horse from the hat and this would be their stake in the overall pot.
Alternatively, if you could only get 12 people, you could get them to pull two horses out of the hat. This would cover all 24 participants, yet it would require them to double up their up-front fees to take part. You could do this all the way down to 3 people if you really want to, yet 24 is probably the most simple way to run it – if you can get that many.
Pull names out of a hat
After you have collected your group of people and gathered the fees, it’s then time to run the most important and the most fun part. Before you can officially have your Melbourne Cup sweepstakes in business, you have to allocate the different bets to the participants. Of course, you will go through in whatever order you please, picking names out and assigning them to each individual. And you will continue to do this until each horse has been assigned to one of the sweepstakes participants.
Just make sure that the people who receive the names don’t lose them, or allocating the winnings would then be quite tricky!
Process all of the wagers at a reputable betting site
For argument’s sake, let’s say that you have a group of 24 people and you charge them £1 each to participate in the sweepstakes. This means that you have a total cash pot of £24, yet this still needs to be placed on the race for any winnings to be paid out. Therefore, we recommend that whoever is running the Melbourne Cup sweepstakes (most likely yourself) goes ahead and places the bets at a reputable site.
But since you will want to have a range of winners here, not just one person, the market you will back will be the ‘each-way’ market. Just to clarify, this market would divide a portion of the bet onto the winning horse, and the other part would go on the horse to place. By doing this, you are guaranteed a handful of winners depending on how many places a bookmaker is paying out on.
Of course, the operator of the Melbourne Cup sweepstakes will then check the payouts once the race is over.
Split the winnings among the winners
The final part of the process is to determine which of the sweepstakes participants have been fortunate enough to be part of the winning group. Say your bookmaker was paying out on four places for the Melbourne Cup, there would be 4 people due a payout from your sweepstakes. Hypothetically, if the total returns were £100 from all of the winning bets, these people would each get £25, assuming you were splitting the pot evenly.
Once again, this is just an example, and the total returns will vary depending on the fees to enter and the odds at your chosen bookmaker.
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