We had a raffle at the local community center. Everyone bought tickets, and the prizes seemed decent (bottle of wine, large wicker chair, rocking horse). The winner of all three draws was the long-standing cleaning lady of the center, who had just had a grandchild and was heading for retirement.

I’m all for supporting someone’s retirement, especially for someone who has given a lot of effort to making the community feel hospitable.
But not like this, not like this…

On my 18th birthday I bought 2 scratch lottery tickets, and doubled my money (20EUR spend, 40EUR return). Never played since. I beat the system 😎

I somehow managed to get through to a radio show that was having a giveaway, and answered their question correctly. I won tickets to a concert, and a load of their sponsor’s merch. I was still young, but even then I knew my luck was shit, so I was really excited even though I didn’t like the band I was going to see lol

Didn’t matter.

The tickets arrived the day after the concert had happened, and the merch was all either factory seconds or used (so all slightly damaged in some way - a stain, an undone seam, a broken clasp). I tried calling to let them know, but all they did was send another load of damaged merch.

Off the top of my head, that’s the one and only thing I’ve ever won.

I really do have shit luck lol

I rarely even participate in these. But back then I won a Logitech MX518 (the original) at a competition of a PC hardware magazine.

I won Blockbusters Donkey Kong tournament for the SNES when I was 6. Got a champions card that gave me one free video game rental every other week for a year. I won at two stores and my brother won in 3 stores in his age bracket. So we constantly had free new games to play. That was the best year ever.

Maybe fun fact: Dr. Disrepect’s “Two Time Champion” claim is from these blockbuster tournaments.

I’ve personally never won anything. I’ve entered maybe 1 or 2 of those contests yt people I watch/used to watch did where you go to the link and click on all the social media junk in hopes of winning a console, but never did win anything.

But a real long time ago my brother did win some contest. I think it was a radio contest but I don’t remember nor care much about it. Won some free martial arts lessons (probably just karate but I don’t remember). I think it was maybe 1-2 of them or something else as a promotion progresses something. I don’t fully remember because this was well over a decade ago.

Around 1981 or 82, I was about 12 years old and the local college radio station had a call-in for identifying snips of popular songs at the time. Best I can recall, it was Girls by Dwight Twilly, Let the Music Play by Shannon, and I think there were 3 others but I can’t remember what they were. The prize was a discount coupon to the local pizza place.

I went in on an office lottery thing, we won 20k, ended up being about 500 ea. In takehome But still nice, it was mostly about the thrill of winning more than the winnings themselves, it was my first time buying in. I also won a 400 dollar smart watch at a work raffle.

I won The Game.

I believe you all lost.

I was a volunteer working at the first LinuxCon in 2009, I worked in the expo hall and at the end of the first day one of the booths had a raffle to win an android G1 developer phone and I ended up winning.

The best part was, by winning the phone instead of having to buy it through t–mobile I was able to keep my service without having to pay for adding data and it was a couple years before I had to actually start paying for data.

I already won the lottery. Born in the US of A baby!

About twenty iPods.

Walkers, a snack company, was running a contest where you could enter a draw every ten minutes, 24 hours a day, to win an iPod. They also had a website where you could get an entry code without buying anything. I was one of the few people to have unlimited texts and a phone controllable by Bluetooth at the time, so I ran a script to just spam the free entry codes. Somehow they never cottoned on.

When the internet was still young I entered an online drawing to win a vacation on a travel website. I never really thought much of it. One day I decided to answer the phone even though we got lots of telemarketers. The woman was from the travel company and said I’d won a rafting trip in CO and that this had been their third and final attempt to reach me. It was totally legit, they paid for the flight, rafting trip and rental car. Due to low river levels the trip was moved to the San Juan river in UT though. It was an awesome trip. We even paid some extra to keep the rental car longer to add some extra sightseeing days to the trip.

When I was a kid we won second in a general mills national contest for “a treasure chest of games.” They sent us a cardboard board with plastic pieces and like 4 games on it. Someone sued based on the commercial, and we got some cereal coupons.

Many years later, I won like 3rd in a Mountain Dew cap contest. They actually sent me the snow board - no binding or anything, but Mountain Dew has integrity.

A few years ago I won an expensive audio interface and headset from a retailer. Funny thing is that I don’t remember signing up for that specific giveaway