July has been hot! Not just literally, but in terms of wins too. I've been aberrationally successful, for which I'm endlessly grateful, and bracing myself for a super-drought as the world realises its error and the cosmic balance lurches back into place.
Possibly the first step in this regard was one of my prizes smashing before I got the chance to use it. Fortunately, it was only a small bottle of serum, but frustrating nonetheless.
Also, despite what I say in this video, the coat *is* the one I asked for - I just got muddled with the one I'd ordered for my other son! As for the football, I can confirm that the signatures are from regular civilians whose celebrity is based entirely on the fact that they happen to have the same name as someone else.
Most of my July wins are in this month's unboxing video. The largest, however, I'm saving for a forthcoming post as it really was rather cool...
The FIFA World Cup used to be the cornerstone of my life. I got together with my other half during the 1998 tournament, and exactly four years later, we were married. Another four years on and we were still gorging on as many matches as we could fit around full-time work. Come 2010, however, our first-born was three months old and did not care for international football - not one little bit.
I was on the afternoon shift at that point, but every time I sat down, he’d wail. Watching Germany dissect England is excruciating at best, but there’s nothing like doing it while you slow dance with a mardy bairn to really put the boot in. It was at this point that I stopped watching football.
That’s not to say I stopped taking an interest, however, as I’d just learned about matched betting - the clever-dick form of gambling where you don’t end up out of pocket as the bookies kindly pony up the stakes for you. Now’s not the time for the full ins and outs of the hustle as they’re way too complicated to explain in a glib aside (though if you are interested, see Nikki Hunter-Pike's post), suffice to say that it was a boom-time for bookmakers running promotions to expand their social media reach.
888Sport, in particular, was on a mission to own the market, and was giving away free bets and branded merchandise left, right and centre - in the space of a year, its various score prediction and caption competitions had provided me with a branded polo shirt, rugby ball, laptop sleeve, three hoodies, two packs of cards and a set of poker chips, not to mention countless free bets and a £60 sportswear voucher.
Then came the big one - the World Cup score-prediction comp. At this point, they really lost their marbles, because in addition to prizes for the overall competition winners, they also encouraged entrants to set up their own mini leagues, and gave these players prizes too. How they worked out a scoring system for the mini leagues I’ve no idea. Truthfully, I wasn’t paying attention. All I knew was that I hadn’t made the top three in the main league, so I didn’t give it another minute’s thought. So, you can imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, a £120 voucher to spend on sportswear turned up out of the blue.
Sadly, it wasn’t long after this that the penny dropped at 888 HQ and I was barred for being - quite literally - a liability, as 888’s computers twigged that I was taking more money out of the company than I was putting in, so banned me from making any further wagers.
Disappointing as it was to call time on our relationship, lessons were learned and we both moved on: I stopped messing around and committed myself to comping properly, while 888 approached the next World Cup in a far more austere manner, with any suggestion of a re-run knocked squarely on the head.
Nonetheless, it is a truth universally acknowledged that where there’s a World Cup, there’s a prediction competition, and Brazil 2014 was no different. Filling the void left by 888 was a competition of even greater magnitude and generosity, which the Brazil Tourism Board had opened up to pretty much anyone, anywhere. This giveaway had over a hundred prizes, from vouchers to cameras to various Apple products. I didn’t make the top twenty, but still copped an iPod Nano, which was awesome - well, apart from the £30 of import duty I had to pay to receive it.
As this was my first year of comping during a World Cup tournament, I was only just starting to become aware of the sheer volume of competitions that spring up around it - not just the big-ticket giveaways from the official partners and sponsors, but also the numerous unofficial comps from companies that want to join in the excitement, but lack the deep pockets of companies like MasterCard or McDonald’s. For example, thanks to Carpetright, I walked away with an official England shirt; concurrent with this, I also won a tee-shirt of Archie Gemmill scoring against Holland in 1978 - which rounds out my heritage neatly.
The England shirt has served me well - not because I enjoy sartorial statements of nationalism, but rather because it’s super light-weight and doesn’t cling to my sweaty body when I play badminton. It’s also handy for entering football-related competitions, and to this end finally paid dividends this year when I won a giftcard and football from Screwfix for posting a picture of my best football cheer to Instagram. Considering that Screwfix was an official sponsor of the ITV coverage this year, surprisingly few people were entering its comps. Its daily Facebook giveaways were (as I discovered too late) getting fewer than 200 entrants, while this Instagram comp had barely a dozen. So, a lesson learned for next time is to check out all the TV partners too!
This year, I also won prizes from two completely unaffiliated companies - three £30 Decathlon vouchers and my choice of football shirt from the FIFA store. The football shirt came from a simple tag-and-follow comp on Instagram - again with barely a dozen entries. Unfortunately FIFA had sold out of my first, second and third choice of kit, so if you were wondering why there’s a picture of me on Instagram wearing the Japanese away strip, now you know.
The first Decathlon voucher, meanwhile, came from a prediction comp I’d found via Google before the tournament began. What I hadn’t clocked, however, was that the score prediction aspect was purely for fun, and that the question you had to bat away before entering said predictions was actually the tie-breaker for that round. You can therefore imagine my surprise when the promoter mailed to let me know that my throwaway comment - “5.30” - was one of the most creative responses to the question, “At what point of the working day are you most on top of your game?”
Any criticism you may wish to throw at the weakness of that response is well deserved - I dread to imagine the quality of the rest of the field that week. Still, if ever there was an example of “got to be in it to win it”, this was it. And, since we’re looking for takeaways, it was also a reminder of the importance of reading instructions!
In any case, you can be sure that I upped my game for the last few rounds. And yes, my renewed efforts did pay off, as I made it into the top three for the final two rounds, giving me a grand total of £90 to spend at Decathlon.
The other great thing about this year’s World Cup was England’s progress. Notwithstanding their overreliance on set-pieces and their charmed avoidance of top-notch opposition, the fact that the team advanced as far as it did was a boon for flash comps. To be sure, I drew a complete blank here, but again, some of these comps had ridiculously few entrants, so I’ll definitely be getting my Tweetdeck house in order for 2022.
At this point, it bears repeating that 2022 will be FIFA's first Winter World Cup, and in case I need to spell it out - that means it’s going to clash with the advents. With this in mind, I’m going to get my first prediction in early: it’ll be carnage!
How did your World Cup season go? Or did you focus on Wimbledon or some other event? Let me know in the comments section!
And so to June's wins! This roundup is notable for (a) the absence of the water bottle I won and (b) the awful face I make when my varifocals are sliding down my nose. I really must work on that...
There was also the matter of my Lucozade Made to Move win - but more on that another time.
In case you're wondering, the water bottle came from a local flash comp but didn't come in the post, so I totally failed to capture it on video. I'd apologise but I imagine you're over it already!
I’m in decline. You may have noticed that my blog posts are getting fewer and farther between. I’m likewise entering fewer comps, or to be precise, I’m entering fewer interesting comps.
A competition to win a £5000 holiday is, of course, interesting. But that’s not the kind of interesting I’m talking about. Most big-ticket competitions are tediously straightforward to enter and consequently have thousands of entrants. In other words, the chances of winning are very, very small.
That’s not to say impossible - I once won an iPad Mini from a pool of about 2000 entries, but that kind of success has since eluded me, and goodness knows how many comps I’ve entered since then. Not as many as some hardcore compers, I’ll admit, but a healthily obscene number all the same.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I prefer competitions with smaller odds. It’s not just that the likelihood of winning is greater (like, duh!), but the ones that are more challenging tend also to be more interesting.
Unfortunately, my wit has gone somewhat out the window of late. The spike in my first-born’s challenging behaviour is presently celebrating its six-month anniversary and I am wiped out. I used to be smart. I’ve got certificates and stuff. These days, however, I can barely operate a spoon.
Me, when I still had brains. By which, I mean hair.
As a result, I’m failing to enter so many of the effort comps that I’ve bookmarked that I might as well not bother with them at all.
But that’s not to say I’m thinking of quitting this game. Rather, I’m cutting my crack to fit my clock, or however the saying goes.
In my case, that means sticking to Instagram. To be sure, tagging and following is a pretty mindless way to enter comps, but (a) you can do five-minute micro-sessions when you’re grabbing a breather between arguments; and (b) the random draws are less opaque than those for Twitter comps (see Di Coke's post on the subject).
That last point is particularly salient, as it puts Joe Average Comper with 100 followers on the same footing as a comping blogger with 5000 followers. Well, theoretically, anyway. As with any prize draw, there’s nothing to stop a promoter from pulling names out of the hat till they find one they like, but I can’t imagine there’s that many bad eggs out there to make that worth worrying about. And in any case, I’m still managing enough wins to keep it interesting.
The bottom line is that this hobby is fantastically scalable.
If you want a hardcore comping session, then go for it. Enter hundreds a night if that works for you - it’s a numbers game after all. But if all you want is a bit of fun, then go where the odds are smaller. There might not be as many tellies and games consoles, but everyone needs protein bars and gin, don’t they?
How do you change your comping game when life gets the better of you? Do you focus on the big stuff, the fun comps, or simply pull down the shutters? Let me know in the comments below!
The Mayday Bank Holiday was the hottest day of the year, and while I was out basking in my mum’s garden, I noticed myself enjoying a warm, if slightly unfamiliar, fuzzy feeling. It wasn’t just the sun radiating positive vibes - although that always helps; the long overdue family reunion helped too. But the clincher, if I'm honest, was firing up the coals for the first barbie of the season.
I hate cooking. And yet I love to grill. It’s not just that there’s something primal about it, or that my life zenithed when my first-born was ten weeks old and we barbecued for 20 days solid. There’s also fact that I love reconnecting with my prizes - in this case, the cute little Weber barbecue that I won a couple years back.
Every time I set it up, I smile to recall how it was, until recently, the largest object I’d ever won, and how it arrived on the same day as the least physically imposing prize I’ve ever received: a font.
Sadly, I must confess that said font (Thistle Creek) has had precious little impact on my life. Unlike, for example, the swanky watch I won from a 2015 Warner Bros promotion, which I was using to time the cooking, while sipping my prize lager from the last advent season, and wearing one of the brand-spanking shirts I won less than a fortnight prior.
In the same vein, when I first started writing this post, I was wearing the sweater I won at Christmas, having just packed away the football shirt I won during the last World Cup and boxed up the night’s leftovers in the Happy Jackson pots I won that same year. This was after making my first-born stop reading his Roald Dahl book and put away his X-Men headphones, both of which I won in 2016, and washing up my wife's flask (won 2017). I’ve also just finished off the chocolate I won last month, and before I pass out tonight, will be applying the fancy eye serum I mentioned a couple of weeks back.
Am I a premier league comper? I doubt it. On the off-chance that I do somehow qualify for the top-flight, I’m very much a Huddersfield - standing under the armpits of giants.
Indeed, I’m in perpetual awe of the many fantastic - and more importantly - dedicated compers out there, whose drive to win the big-ticket prizes is plainly inspirational. People like Di Coke and Nikki Hunter-Pike, for example, spring to mind - and not just because of their success, but also because of all the work they do to support the wider comping community.
Next to these guys, I’m a blatant also-ran. But that's also cool. Comping isn't a sprint race; if anything, it's a marathon. I’ve been in the game for about four years now, and despite a few episodes of mojo fatigue keeping me on the sidelines, the wins have slowly but surely stacked up, and I can confidently say that my “winner’s luck” has manifestly embedded itself into my life. That translates to a constant reminder of what it feels like to be lucky. It also translates to feeling good about myself.
Some might call my win rate unremarkable, but that’s no bad thing! Unremarkable, means replicable. It means that anyone with half a mind to “be lucky” can make it happen! And once you've made it happen, soak it up as much as you can. Every prize is a happy moment made concrete.
To be sure, this isn't mindfulness per se. Nevertheless, if you take time to contemplate each episode of joy that literally passes through your hands each day, then you'll find an awful lot of cheer coursing through your brain. And that's definitely good for your stress!
Does comping make you feel like a lucky person? Do your past wins blend into the wallpaper or do you keep an active eye out for how they weave their way into your everyday life? How does that make you feel?
With apologies for tardiness, here's the prize unboxing for April. I also apologise for gurning at the camera halfway through when I thought it wasn't recording, and the ceaseless heckling from my second-born.
