Lottery news from http://www.guardian.co.uk/
The lottery operator Camelot today unveiled a new twice-weekly game aimed at raising money to help pay for the 2012 London Olympics.
Tickets for the Dream Number game, priced at £1, will go on sale from July 13. Draws will take place on Saturdays and Wednesdays, running alongside the main lottery game, with the first on Saturday July 14.
Dream Number is the first draw set up by Camelot as part of its drive to raise £1.5bn to help build stadia and the Olympic village.
It is intended that £750m of the total will come from a series of Olympic-themed and scratchcard games, eight of which have already started and raised £16.3m last year.
The rest of the £1.5bn will include £340m drawn from the main lottery's sports lottery fund and £410m from the good causes fund - a move questioned by the Liberal Democrats, who argued that charities could lose out.
It is also estimated that London council tax payers will contribute 38p a week for 10 years to pay for the games, which will be based around Stratford, east London.
Dream Number players have a one in 10 chance of winning any prize, with 1m winning combinations possible. Players can win cash prizes ranging from £2 to £500,000 if they match up to seven numbers in the same order they are drawn.
Every play slip will come with the Dream Number option and feature a seven-digit dream number. It is up to players to mark "yes" if they want to play the number.
Lord Coe, who led the successful Olympic bid team, said: "This is, in its own way, the most important [of the games so far] because this is the first draw. It is the first time that we will have television time."
The Camelot chief executive, Dianne Thompson, said sales of tickets for games in support of the 2012 Olympics had "got off to a tremendous start, exceeding our first year target".
The culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, said any surplus in the money raised from the themed games would be ring-fenced for the Olympics.
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