Spain: El Gordo and New Casino

So I was reading this announcement that Harrah's will be building a huge new casino near Ciudad Real in Spain that will be modeled after Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Interesting. But what jumped out at me in the news piece was mention of the annual El Gordo lottery drawing that takes place each December 22 in Spain. While Americans prepare to watch football and the ever-burning Yule Log, Spainards sit glued to their TV's for three hours, waiting to see who will win this massive Christmas lottery. Everybody in Spain buys tickets for this lottery which awards three big prizes and thousands of smaller prizes to over 13,000 people, totalling $2.5 billion in cash prizes. According to the Guardian, last year's winning tickets all came from the northern Spainish town of Sort which translates to "luck" in Catalan, but it's no coincidence, of course, that the town sells a higher percentage of tickets. El Gordo uses a complex system of shared numbers that divides wealth among millions of people holding numbers that go from 00001 to 66,000. Each of those 66,000 numbers is repeated 195 times with different serial numbers. It will be interesting to see where the winning tickets pop up this year. Oh yeah, and about that casino…construction won't start late next year, just in time for another El Gordo jackpot.

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