> Instant win results are settled before the reveal: prizes are pinned to entry numbers before the game opens. What the animation can and cannot do. 18+. Source: https://granddraws.co.uk/instant-win-decided-before-you-play --- # Instant wins are decided before the reveal **Yes. On our free instant win the prizes are pinned to entry numbers before the game opens, and your result is settled the moment your play is recorded, before any animation starts.**Nothing you do during the reveal changes it. You cannot scratch a better panel, tap at a better moment or improve an outcome by playing more slowly, because by the time anything moves on screen the answer already exists. 18+, Great Britain. The free instant win is open to play on the game page, one play per account per week. ## The order things happen in Three stages, and the order is the whole point. - Before the week's game opens, each of the 58 prizes is attached to a particular entry number. That allocation is made once, up front, and is not touched afterwards. - When you take your play, the server issues you an entry number and checks it against the allocation. That check is the moment your result exists. It happens away from your device, so nothing running in your browser takes part in it. - Then your browser shows you the result. On ours that is a scratch panel, and whichever shape a reveal takes it is doing the same job: telling you something that has already been decided. ## What the reveal can and cannot do It can make the moment worth having. A result appearing on screen with no ceremony is information; a reveal is an experience, and a free game is allowed to be enjoyable. What it cannot do is change the answer, and that is worth knowing in both directions. It will not take a prize away from you because you looked away, closed the tab or lost signal halfway through, and it will not hand you one because you timed something well. A result that exists on the server survives a browser that gives up on it. This is also why a game that implies otherwise should give you pause. A wheel you are invited to stop yourself, a bar you have to catch at the right point: those are presentation. If stopping the wheel genuinely decided the prize, the prize would be decided by your device, which is the one place in the chain nobody can check. ## Why decide it in advance at all Because an allocation made up front can be committed to, and a thing you commit to can be checked afterwards. If every prize position is fixed before the first play is taken, the question "was this changed once it got expensive" has an answer rather than an opinion. The alternative is deciding each result at the moment of play against a probability the operator holds privately. That can be perfectly fair, and it is also the version where nothing is left over afterwards for anybody outside the operator to look at. We already take the committed approach on the main draws, where the method is published in advance and the result can be recomputed afterwards by anyone who wants to. Our draw checker is that in practice. A fixed allocation on the free game is the same instinct applied to a game with a small pot in it. ## It is also why the prize counts can be published A fixed allocation has a side effect worth naming: it makes the numbers publishable. Because the ladder is decided before the week opens, we can state how many of each prize exist and divide them into the entry numbers, which is where the published odds come from. A game that settled each result privately at the moment of play could still quote a probability, but it could not show you a count, because there would be nothing countable until afterwards. The fixed version is the one where the arithmetic is available before you play rather than asserted. ## Not to be confused with the paid competitions The free instant win is its own game and sits alongside the competitions rather than inside them. No paid Grand Draws competition carries an instant win on its tickets, so a ticket somebody bought is never settled at the point of purchase. Every paid entry goes into one draw, run at 9pm on the closing date. So there are two different mechanisms on this site, kept apart on purpose. One result is settled before you see it and told to you immediately. The other is settled publicly on a stated date and can be recomputed by anyone. ## Instant wins are decided before the reveal, answered ### Is the result of an instant win already decided before I play? On ours, yes. Prizes are attached to entry numbers before the week opens and your result is settled on the server when your play is recorded, which is before any animation runs. ### Can I affect the outcome by how I play the reveal? No. Scratching differently, tapping at a particular moment or playing slowly changes nothing, because the answer exists before the reveal starts. The animation is how you are told, not how it is decided. ### What happens if my connection drops during the reveal? Nothing is lost. The result was settled on the server, not in your browser, so it is still there when you come back. A reveal that failed to finish is a display problem rather than a lost prize. ### Why does the animation exist if it changes nothing? Because it makes the moment enjoyable, which is a reasonable thing for a free game to do. The line we hold is that it is never dressed up as the thing deciding your result. ### Do the paid competitions work the same way? No. No paid Grand Draws competition awards a prize at the point of entry. Every paid entry goes into a single draw that runs at 9pm on the closing date, by a method published in advance and recomputable afterwards at our draw checker. ## Related - [Recompute one of our draws yourself](https://granddraws.co.uk/draw-check) - [How we prove our draws are fair](https://granddraws.co.uk/guides/how-we-prove-our-draws-are-fair) - [What a spin or scratch reveal does](https://granddraws.co.uk/instant-win-spin-and-win) - [Where the published odds come from](https://granddraws.co.uk/instant-win-odds) - [Instant win competitions, explained](https://granddraws.co.uk/instant-wins) - [The free instant win game](https://granddraws.co.uk/free-instant-wins)