How close have you come to winning?

[Twisto]

A quick tale before I ask the question.

Last summer, a local Machester radio station was running a great competition.
It was quite simple really, you just had to answer 3 questions correctly, that are picked randomly from a pool of 103 set questions.
The competition had been running for about 6 weeks, and most of the questions had been asked already. I was quite into this comp, and so I researched all the correct answers, and hoped my turn would come to have a go.
After about 10 attempts at getting through, I finally got on air for a go.
Question 1 + 2 had already been asked in the previous weeks, and I knew the answers, but question 3 had not been asked before.

In what year did Samuel Pepys start to write his diary?

I knew he was around during the 'Great fire of London' era, so I hazarded a quick guess of 1661 (you have 5 seconds to give your answer).
They then told me I had correctly guessed 2 out of 3, and that was that.
I just had to know the answer, and after a quick google, I found out it was 1660.
I was so bloody close.
The prize by the way was 50,000 Pounds.

So the question is...
How close have you ever come to winning a decent prize?

 

[Ronin Storm]

I can be really good at winning small stuff -- bottles of champagne, teddy bears, gold fish and so on. I've never been close to a real cash prize, though. I don't enter the competitions. I think I just don't see the point. I see the numbers, the odds of winning, and I do my maths. When I figure I have more chance of being hit by a falling fridge or could have bought a new game with the money I spent on this or that then I figure I'll go with what I know, not pitch near blind into the unknown. I think people enter competitions on hope, the dream of winning. I just don't find that inspires me.

 

[elDiablo]

thatbloke walks into our uni pub (The Stag's Head) after a lecture and buys a drink. With the spare ?1 he has, you goes on the fruit machine. Second spin he gets 3 jackpot symbols, and only needs 1 nudge to get the fourth. He gets the nudge.

He then rings me to say he's sitting at the bar getting ?250 pound coins changed into notes the lucky so-and-so!

 

[thatbloke]

thatbloke walks into our uni pub (The Stag's Head) after a lecture and buys a drink. With the spare ?1 he has, you goes on the fruit machine. Second spin he gets 3 jackpot symbols, and only needs 1 nudge to get the fourth. He gets the nudge.

He then rings me to say he's sitting at the bar getting ?250 pound coins changed into notes the lucky so-and-so!

cha-ching!

 

[SgtFury]

Worked in a pub for a while at Uni and they did Play your cards right every Friday. Noone had won it in ages and the jackpot was at ?1000 pounds, they decided to split it and have a ?500 prize for that night.

So the raffle happened everyone put a quid in to have a go, I put a quid in and got a number too. Working away, suddenly its my number pulled out.

Playing the cards it was all going well pretty easy choices and then it came to the last card........... a 7 crummy one to get..... so I chose higher and turned away, I couldn't look.













Ding Ding I was right got my self ?500!!! Nice roll of dosh that was too.

 

[decky101]

Unlucky my friend. Missing out on 50 grand by one year i mean how close can you get? I nearly one a car once in a ballot but the winning ticket was just 2 numbers higher than mine . Still, it was only a ford fiesta

 

[lt.kirby]

lol u would have loved the ford...admit it

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

I kind got really lucky but very badly unlucky at the same time. On the one hand, we got really lucky and got 5 numbers on the lottery (we won a paltry 1.3 grand), on the other hand, we were really unlucky not to get another number and scoop a couple of million

 

[Taffy]

thatbloke walks into our uni pub (The Stag's Head) after a lecture and buys a drink. With the spare ?1 he has, you goes on the fruit machine...

You can get special keys for those things that tell you when the next jackpot is going to come around i.e. how many more people have to put money in until a winning combination comes up. My mate has one, he's always winning on the bloody things!

I once won ?100 for buying a ticket to a raffle that cost 20p, so all in all I got a nice little return on that investment.