Where Everyone Has a Chance

Most people treat every sweepstakes entry as a coin flip, as if the outcome is entirely out of their hands the moment they hit submit. That assumption isn't wrong, but it's incomplete, and the gap between what's actually random and what's actually controllable is...

Most sweepstakes entrants spend a lot of time thinking about prizes from the winner's perspective — what they'd do with the cash, where they'd go on the trip, whether they'd keep or sell the car. Far fewer think about prizes from the sponsor's perspective, which is...

There is a specific and particularly frustrating way to lose a sweepstakes prize, and it has nothing to do with the randomness of the drawing. It happens after your name has already been selected, after the excitement of a win notification has arrived in your inbox,...

If you're entering sweepstakes with any regularity using your primary personal email address, you already know what happens: your inbox becomes a mixture of things that need your attention and an ever-growing flood of promotional emails, entry confirmations, and brand...

There's a category of sweepstakes that doesn't get much attention in online communities, doesn't show up prominently in sweepstakes aggregator sites, and rarely generates the kind of excitement that drives thousands of people to enter simultaneously. These are the...

Most sweepstakes entrants treat the confirmation email the same way they treat a terms and conditions page — a formality to be acknowledged and immediately ignored. You submit your entry, something arrives in your inbox, you register vaguely that it showed up, and you...