Evening Herald & My Home.ie Competition

spockety wrote:

The problem is that no matter how ridiculous you think the amount you have is, someone else will have an amount even more ridiculous than you. No matter who you are.

The winner will present an amount which people will find completely absurd. And the winner will not be you, no matter who you are, or how many Herald's you have sourced.

Would tend to agree with this but it might turn out that the absurd amount could belong to someone here on boards and good luck to them. I was considering entering this comp but I don't have deep enough pockets!

Personally, I think the person that wins it will in some way be connected with the Herald and/or a newspaper distributor. The link won't be obvious of course, but I reckon it will be there in some shape or form.

declanoneill wrote:

Who's willing to put up how much they've gathered. My girlfriend and I are just shy of 40 Million but I've a strong feeling people here will far surpass that.

Well i have just over 90Million at the moment i was confidant i'd be in with a good chance but by the sounds of things the winning bid is gonna be around 150-200Million, i dont have that spending power..

Some interesting points being made but here are some facts to mull over.

These competitions that the Herald run, are done to SELL lots of copies of the paper and for no other reason.
They ALWAYS start with small valued tokens and ALWAYS finish with the highest denominations (so people will buy more and more copies of the paper).
The highest amount will always be the last day because they will sell the most number of papers that day. 100 tokens with a value of 10,000 is worth the same as 20 tokens with a face value of 50,000. So if you had spent 100 Euro buying the 10,000 tokens, somebody else could now get the same total for 20 Euro!
You have to buy the paper (bar code on other side) so somebody working in the Herald couldn't print them off as they would have to be bought. I think it might also state employees are not allowed enter.
The winner will not be one person but a consortium. This could range from 5 people to 50 people, the number of people doesn't matter just the AMOUNT! I

I predict the winning bid will be over 500 million!
This is equivilant to 10,000 papers at 50,000 token (or 10,000 Euro).
This would be a lot of ONE person but not for a consortium.
If you had 20 people at 1,000 Euro a person and only bought the papers on the last day (anybody who has done this before would know the highest amount was always on the last day), then you would accumulate this huge amount.

I was going to do this competition and had 20,000 Euro in cash from people
who wanted to participate.
You might be able to afford to drop 1,000 yourself but not 20,000, that's why you get a consortium together. The apartment/duplex I reckoned after taking into account various costs etc, might be sold for 250,0000
So 20 people at 1,000=20,000 outlay.
Winner(?) then sell for 250,000 so each person get 12,500 Euro
(includes original 1,000).
Not a bad return.
The reason I was going for 20,000 was, very very unlikely any other consortium would match that amount so to "guarantee" winning it.
From the Heralds point of view it's HAPPY DAYS, they will have people/consortiums buying various amounts from say 500 Euro probably
up to at least 10k's worth.

For all the people that entered the competition, you will be delighted to hear I (and the rest) didn't enter it.
The only reason was having done this thing before and won a lot of stuff over the years, I couldn't guarantee myself getting my hands on enough copies of the paper.
20,000 copies of the Herald would be very hard to buy.
Most shops etc would sell you 20 copies of the paper without ringing alarm bells. So I would have had people buying papers all over Dublin city
and there was no point in buying say 10,000 copies as "you wouldn't be guaranteed" winning the competition. 20,000 however should have been enough (famous last words).
One last word.
Bring the papers to the recycle places, you won't get charged!

Is there anyone out there with circa 40 million who wants to join as a syndicate. (More worth your while than selling them at least you have a greater chance of winning)
I was trying to win this on my own but reailsed I couldnt/
Trying to keep syndicate members down with high value of tokens so we get greater return (and hopefully all get deposit on house etc....)
Shares are on a pro rata basis....
A few members already - only looking for one or two more.....
Let me know asap.
Need to draw up legal contracts.....

When are the winners announced?

Hi All,

For those interested, there is an article about the winner of the Evening Herald competition in today's Sunday Times which I thought you might be interested in. Paddy Kehoe (could this be you PaddyPoker?), the winner of the Evening Herald Bid for a Hollioake Home competition, is a bar owner who was part of the Lottery syndicate who in 1992 bought up most of the numbers in the lottery covering 1.8m of the 1.95m combinations and they won a share (there were 2 other winners) exceeding the amount they spent, and a line at the time cost 50p. Subsequently the lottery numbers were increased from 36 to 42.

Paddy and friends apparently bought up approximately 50,000 newspapers in the last few days of the Evening Herald competition particularly on the Friday when there was no horse racing and hence lots of papers were available in shops (spending at least €50,000) and it is believed that there were five in the syndicate according to the Sunday Times. The winning bid printed in the Evening Herald on Friday, was €1,949,662,000.

I think people should be warned against doing this competition in future and that they should not bother wasting their time and energy doing it, and put their hard earned money into some sort of savings vehicle for a deposit instead. It is taking advantage of the desperation that people are feeling, myself included, that they will never be able to afford to purchase their own home at current ever-spiralling house prices, and will be in the tenant trap forever paying off someone else's mortgage!

The competition was advertised, as the Sunday Times article says, as follows: "So either one of these outstanding homes could be yours for absolutely nothing, nada, zilch." It could be argued that this was misleading advertising because unless the Evening Herald intended to give away papers with tokens for free, the above homes were going to cost at least the price of the papers spent by the competition entrant who won it. Unless you have unlimited access to funds, the ordinary Joe Soap on the street does not stand a chance in a so-called competition like this. Even a lottery at least has the element of chance going for it! Apart from choosing a name for the house in the case of two or more highest bids of equal size, there did not appear to be any element of skill which is a normal requirement for running a "competition", other than the skill of being able to spend loads on newspapers and the ability to use a scissors, oh and count tokens!

And granted, had I and my friends won, I probably wouldn't be complaining like this, but I would still think this type of "competition" was patently unfair, shame on you Evening Herald! Any legal eagles out there familiar with the Lotteries and Gaming Acts and with advertising law, who may have an educated opinion on this?

Roz.

I do not know if that would work as I see on their website that entry by post is also closed due to the fact that they have reached their safety limits. I do not have an entry form for the competition by the way, sorry, and I only bought the Herald for the above mentioned competition plus to find out the results (and yes I recycled every single one in Coolmine and Collin's Avenue Recycle Centres). I have entered the Mini Marathon - got the entry form out of a paper someone else bought for a change.

I wonder if giving them a ring might help - the number of the Women's Mini Marathon Office is 01 2930984. Hope you get to enter because it is an enjoyable day/walk/jog/run with a good atmosphere.