Introduction
BOTB (Best of the Best) is one of the UK’s oldest competitions, that has been around since 1999. They are mostly known for their Dream Car competition, where the winner of a weekly spot the ball competition wins a car they have bought a ticket for. They also perform instant win and other prize draws similar to other competitions.
Key Information
- URL: www.botb.com
- Organiser: Best of the Best PLC
- Type: Spot the Ball Competitions & Prize Draws
- Prizes: Cash, Cars, Motorcycles, Other Prizes
Review Summary
BOTB is one of the most legitimate competitions in the UK, and genuinely a fun competition (as long as you enjoy playing spot the ball)! They offer a great way to win a life-changing amount of money by using your own skill.
As the UK’s only proper spot the ball competition, they offer a unique way of winning your dream car, or a nice sum of cash. They also offer a lifestyle competition that is more similar to the other competitions reviewed on this site, for ones that do not wish to play spot the ball. BOTB also runs occasional promotions offering chances to win a car for free for new players, and existing players are also able to get free tickets and to win a car or a cash alternative of almost £100,000!
Unfortunately, the following has to be mentioned: After BOTB was taken over by a new investor in 2023, some parts of the business and competition have since changed – and it’s not necessarily for the best interest of the existing and new players.
BOTB scores a Real Score of 8.4 out of 10. If you are looking for a competition that offers great prizes, a fun entry mechanism, and potential odds (as long as you are able to play spot the ball well); I can recommend BOTB. However, if charitable causes are a key reason to part with your money for a chance to win something, I’d suggest to look at other competitions under the Recommended Competitions page… Unless you count your own potential winnings as charitable work!
If you wish to learn more about how I’ve calculated the Real Score for BOTB, please see the below sections!
Real Score
BOTB has been running spot the ball competitions since 1999, and there is plenty of available information online about the business. Their website also gives visibility to the address of the business, the team, and more.
As far as competitions and businesses go, BOTB is extremely legitimate. While the original owner (William Hindmarch) did sell the company to Globe Invest Limited and the company delisted from the London Stock Exchange, it is still a well-established UK-based private limited company.
You can easily find the latest BOTB winners from their website, and this included proof of the winners in terms of names, photographs and videos of everything from surprising the winners to price deliveries.
BOTB is pretty much setting the gold standard in how a competition should be run, and this includes both their spot the ball competition and their prize draws, and how transparent they are being about the process for both.
As an example, you can see from their winners and results page on their website, how the judging was performed (Example: YouTube Judging Results – Week 41 (7th – 13th October) 2024). They also have auditors taking part in the judging and confirming that is has genuinely been done properly, and there is an auditor’s letter available for each and every judging.
The judging for the draw is also performed and confirmed by external auditors, ensuring there is no foul play.
BOTB is essentially the only company in the UK that runs legitimate online spot the ball competitions. Their competition can be considered to be genuinely a skill-based-game, therefore they are more than compliant with the Gambling Commission’s guidelines for competitions and draws. And as everything is audited and done properly, they are probably the most law-abiding competition out of all the competitions listed on this website.
One of the main reasons they are serious about being above-the-board about legalities and compliance and therefore frequently use auditors and lawyers, is because they are one of the biggest and longest-running competitions in the UK. Therefore, they are under a lot more scrutiny than smaller competitions that may fly ‘under-the-radar’ of such scrutiny. This also had to do with the fact that they used to be publicly listed, and responsible to their shareholders. Also, a lot of the competitions in the UK seem have just copied the terms and conditions from BOTB’s website, indicating that they’d be the ‘trusted source material’ for running legitimate competitions!
However, in the instant win competitions the free entry mechanism is a postal entry route. And as I’ve mentioned in the blog post about free entries, I don’t consider this to be a fully compliant entry mechanism. This is because in practice it’s more convenient and possibly cheaper just pay to enter, rather than to enter via the postal entry route.
Although to BOTB’s credit; the free postal entry links are shown in a very prominent way, which is possibly the most compliant way of showcasing this free postal entry that we have ever seen:
As a business that has been legitimately running competitions since 1999, their track record is pretty much as good as it can get. They have thousands of examples of previous records and winners, and as a well-established company they won’t be disappearing any time soon.
BOTB has a great selection of cars available in their Dream Car Competition, so most of us would be able to find our dream car – or just one that really tickles our fancy. And if you prefer to win cash and not a car, you are always able to take the cash alternative if you wish. At the time of writing this review, you could win a Lamborghini Urus and take the £144,000 cash alternative.
Additionally, you are able to increase the value of your prize up to £50,000 more by opting in for the extra “Cash & Fuel” when purchasing your tickets, that will also give you free fuel for the year if you choose to take the car. So effectively, you could win up to £194,000 with BOTB if you were to choose the Urus and the additional ticket extras.
As you are able to win up to hundreds of thousands of pounds with BOTB, their competition prizes are considered to be life-changing (as discussed in our blog).
But if you do not wish to play spot the ball, you are a bit more limited with the amount of money and prizes you are able to win with their instant win competitions. At the time of writing this review, the highest plain cash amount is £10,000 and the most valuable car would be a Tesla 3 or Mercedes AMG A35. But do keep an eye out for their prize draws, BOTB does sometimes have cash prizes going up to £100,000 or more in their lifestyle competition!
The odds cannot be calculated in the same fashion for the spot the ball competitions, as they can be for other competitions and draws with a fixed ticket number and an actual percentage or a chance of winning. However, the better you are at spot the ball, the better your odds are! Also, as BOTB rewards up to 100% of the ticket prices even if you didn’t win, as long as you get close enough – you’ll be able to play again and therefore increase your odds of winning!
Effectively, the odds for BOTB increase the better you get – and this cannot be said for other competitions or lotteries. It’s not like you can ‘get better at picking the winning numbers’.
While the initial ticket costs seem relatively high in BOTB (especially if playing the full 75 tickets in one go), as long as you are able to play well and consistently enough; the cost of the competition isn’t that high in the long term! And if you play well enough, one could say it’s actually pretty good value for the chance of winning a car.
Below is an example of one of the my own orders where I decided that the picture in use was easy enough so it was worth playing all 75 tickets for. This cost £176.26 in total (almost fully paid for some free game credit on my account), but as the majority of my guesses and tickets played were in zone one and two – BOTB rewarded £145.36 that could be used in the next game(s)!
With all of the above being said, if you are not good at spot the ball and will not get the majority of your guesses back in game credit most of the time… Then BOTB will be quite expensive and not necessarily ‘good value’! Also, as spot the ball requires some extra effort and skill, it may not be for everyone who want to buy just a ticket to enter for a chance to win. Also, the judging process may sometimes result in winning coordinates that doesn’t make sense to most people.
Additionally, BOTB used to allow you to use your game credit for a full year after it was awarded. This has since been reduced to one week, unfortunately. The change was also implemented without properly informing the customers (like myself). Although, after I noticed I had £40+ of Game Credit missing, they did reinstate this to my account (with a narky response to my email), after getting in touch with the customer services. With the style of customer services and changes being made whilst somewhat neglecting the existing customers, it looks like their TrustPilot score has since dropped to 3.8 / 5.0 and now they’ve hidden the TrustPilot rating altogether from their website. (Listen to your existing customers, they’re trying to tell you something!)
This means that you’ll be forced to play pictures that you may find difficult rather than being able to hold on to your credit, and therefore you may not be able to get into Zone 1… Meaning that BOTB isn’t as good value as it used to be a while ago with more flexible game credit terms. A lot of the winners who have won 2 or even 3 times, used to enter the ‘easy pictures’ and pile all their game credit into those, as they were more likely to win it back (and have a better chance of winning, too!)
However, BOTB is still arguably very good value when comparing to other competitions, as no other competition will offer you your money back if you ‘chose your tickets well’!
BOTB has also quite frequently donated into several charities, and each charity and the sum of donation can be viewed on BOTB’s website (scroll down to “Charity” link on the footer to find information about the donations). Although, for the size of the business – these donations have not been as big as they possibly could have been. With the exception of a few £10,000 – £20,000 donations, the rest of the donations have been around £500.
It has been almost a year since they donated (at the time of writing this review), and from the looks of it they might have stopped doing charity altogether under the new management. Therefore, having money going to good causes shouldn’t be the reason why you should play BOTB… Unless you consider your own winnings ‘a good cause’!
As BOTB leads the way in running legitimate and highly professional and audited competitions, and as the only proper spot the ball competition in the UK; they deserve the full bonus point.
Additionally, BOTB offers a free entry for new players – giving you a chance to win a car for free!
Existing players also get rewarded with free tickets and other perks in their Loyalty Club. And you don’t need to spend that much to hit the Gold Tier which is also nice!
Here’s an example selection of cars existing players can play for with their free tickets (Silver Tier):
Finally, as a part of their Loyalty Club you will also be able to enter a free holiday competition! This is exclusive to Loyalty Club members, and depending on your tier you can get up to 3 tickets to play (note that this is not a draw, but also spot the ball!):
Notes
As the longest-running competition, finding information and proof about BOTB is and was a lot easier than other competitions. In addition to the investigation and systemically going through the points as per the scoring framework, some ‘insider knowledge’ was used thanks to having been fairly involved with the company over the years.
– T
Recommended Reviews
BOTB is one of the most legitimate competitions in the UK. They run a legitimate competition (both spot the ball and the prize draws), and everything gets audited and done properly. Doesn’t get more legit than that. Please check out my review of BOTB above for more details!
Quite understandably, some healthy skepticism is good when parting with your hard-earned money. But when it comes to people winning BOTB and whether they ever see their prizes; of course they do! Like any other legitimate competition, lottery or draw; the company sells enough tickets to cover the prize – and whoever played spot the ball well enough gets the car they played for! Guaranteed. Every week.
A number of people appear to also to be looking for ways to either cheat BOTB or the spot the ball competition that they run, or even ways to ‘hack’ it. I have bad news for you: You cannot cheat the system. The closest thing to cheating and gaining an advantage over others is to get better at spot the ball!
As I have discussed in detail my spot the ball dedicated website before; winning means matching your skills with the judges. This means that the most important thing to understand is that you need to match your own skill or pick the final location of the ball like the judges do in order to win. It’s very little consolation if you think you are playing spot the ball well, if you don’t agree with the judges’ end decision. So make sure you study the judging process, and you might get some valuable tips on how the judging is being performed!
If we are exclusively talking about the spot the ball competition, there aren’t any odds as such. As it is genuinely a skill-based game; the better you are at spot the ball the better your hypothetical odds will be.
As I’ve mentioned a while back in my post about the odds of winning BOTB; it’s like asking what are the odds of getting a bullseye in darts? You just need to ask yourself… How good are you at darts? Granted, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. But the point still stands: The better you are at playing the spot the ball game like the panel of BOTB judges are – the better your odds.
As you are competing with other players, it may not be necessary to get your coordinate exactly where the judges have chosen the winning coordinate to be (though this would obviously help massively). What is important however, is that you’ve managed to get the closest to the final coordinate. Also, if you share the closest coordinate with another player who is competing with you; this will result in a tiebreaker situation where the next played tickets will be used to decide the winner. So, make sure you play your tickets in a tight area to increase your chances of walking away as the winner in case of a tiebreaker!
What tends to happen, is that if the image used for the competition is easy (as in the eyes and where the players are looking at are clearer), the winning coordinate tends to be exactly on the money with the judges. But more often than not, the winner will be 1 to 3 coordinates off and still win the competition!
If we were just to calculate the distances from the past 10 competitions (at the time of writing this):
- 07 – 13 Oct (Week 41) 2024: 1 pixel away
- 30 Sep – 06 Oct (Week 40) 2024: 1 pixel away
- 23 – 29 Sep (Week 39) 2024: 0 pixels away
- 16 – 22 Sep (Week 38) 2024: 1 pixel away
- 09 – 15 Sep (Week 37) 2024: 0 pixels away
- 02 – 08 Sep (Week 36) 2024: 1 pixel away
- 26 Aug – 01 Sep (Week 35) 2024: 1 pixel away
- 19 – 25 Aug 2024 (Week 34): 1 pixel away
- 12 – 18 Aug 2024 (Week 33): 0 pixels away
- 05 – 11 Aug (Week 32) 2024: 1 pixel away
We can use the above to draw a somewhat of a simplified conclusion: In 70% of cases there is a 3 x 3 grid with 9 possible winning coordinates. This means that the judges winning coordinate is surrounded by 8 potential coordinates that will be close enough to be able to win the spot the ball competition.
Simplified visualisation of all winning coordinates in 70% of results (exact winning coordinate in red):
Below are a couple of examples where I have been quite close, but not close enough to win.
In the image below, I was 7.07 pixels off (the winner guessed the exact coordinate, which tends to happen in images that are a bit easier like this one):
In this image, I was only 3.60 pixels away – but as the picture was quite easy the winner got the exact coordinate:
Granted, it can be a bit frustrating to be ‘so close’ and not to win the competition! But luckily, if you manage to get as close to the final coordinates like I have done in the examples above – you’ll get 100% of your ticket cost back and you can give the competition another go for free!
The National Lottery
