Are some people destined to win the lottery whilst others are destined to be disappointed year after year? The belief in destiny – the notion that our lives are mapped out in advance – is widespread, but it’s not one that we recommend.

Playing the lottery is quite a healthy habit when you compare it with many of the other things that people spend their money on. Here are five reasons to feel good about your lottery participation:

A Norwich market stallholder matched five main Lotto numbers and the bonus ball on Saturday 7 June, 2008 to win £103,399. Ramon Swinger, who is 48, was settling down in front on the TV with his partner Pat when he discovered the win.

The wonderful thing about the National Lottery is the fantastic stories its winners generate. Have you had a dream that you'd win the lottery? And did you then buy a ticket with those dream numbers? Maybe you have a lotto ticket sitting there and you've not checked to see if it's a winner. Would you spend your winnings on a new car, or medical treatment? Read on to see some quirky ways the lottery can be won, and spent!

Daily lottery games are offered all over the world, and our own Daily Play game here in the UK gives us a 1 in 888,030 chance of winning £30,000 by matching all 7 correct numbers from the range 1 to 27. We can even win a free Lucky Dip ticket as a consolation prize if we fail to match any numbers.

Lottery success visited a couple in Leighton Buzzard on Wednesday 2 July, 2008. Chris Hissey and his wife Karen matched five main numbers plus the bonus ball in the Lotto game to win £103,554, but they didn’t discover this until two weeks later.

It may have launched six years ago in June 2002, but Saturday 19th July, 2008, saw Hotpicks History being made when three people matched five numbers for the first time ever.  Each player wins £130,000 for their efforts.

Playing lottery games by subscription has both advantages and disadvantages, depending on your point of view. In this article we outline the main subscription pros and cons so that you can decide whether playing by subscription is something you could benefit from.

Numbers found in a fortune cookie helped an engineer from Romford, Essex, win a six-figure share of the £2,355,880 Lotto jackpot for Wednesday 25 June, 2008. Daniel Williams, from Harold Wood, was one of ten players who matched all six main lottery numbers and won £235,588 in the process.

For the first time ever in the history of the UK National Lottery the main Lotto draw has produced a quad or "Lotto Quadruplet", that is to say four sequential numbers.  The draw on Saturday 12th July saw the numbers 27, 28, 29 and 30 drop out of the Topaz machine.