Your odds are the entries you hold divided by every entry in the pool. We show that as a percentage on the My Entries page in your account at account.shftdco.com. You can read the same figure the other way round: 1 percent is about one chance in a hundred, and 0.5 percent is about one chance in two hundred.
How your odds are worked out
Take your entries, divide by the total entries in that giveaway, and that is your share of the pool. If you hold one entry in every hundred in the pool, your odds are 1 percent, or roughly one chance in a hundred. Your account does this for you, so there is nothing to calculate. Your odds appear once you hold entries and the pool has been counted.
- Entries come from the listed price of each item, per unit, multiplied by the quantity you buy.
- A discount code lowers what you pay. It does not lower your entries.
- Tax and shipping never earn entries.
- Any item whose whole dollar price ends in 9 counts as the next dollar up, in your favour.
- The per unit figure is rounded to the nearest whole entry before it is multiplied by quantity, so it can round down as well as up.
- Cart subtotal tiers add extra entries on top of the item entries.
- One bonus entry code applies per order, the one that earns you the most. A code can multiply that order's entries and add a flat amount on top. The Official Rules set the limit per person for a giveaway.
- Fast Track passes are a one time digital purchase and earn entries on their own price. They are not a membership and give no ongoing status.
- Every rate is frozen at the moment you place the order. A later change never alters entries you have already earned.
Why your odds move while a giveaway is open
The pool keeps growing while entries are open. New orders keep adding entries to it, so your share can fall even though your own entries have not changed. Nothing has been taken from you. Entries are never removed once they are awarded, and there is no mechanism to claw them back. Your odds settle only when entries close.
Entering without buying
There is a free mail-in route, with no purchase necessary. The Official Rules give the exact method. Follow it from there, because the details are set out in full in the rules.
Where to see your odds
Sign in at account.shftdco.com and open My Entries from the account side navigation. It shows the active giveaway with a live countdown, the entries you hold, your odds, and your entry numbers. There are also summary blocks on your profile, your order list and each order page, so you can see what one order earned. When a giveaway closes and the draw is under way it appears under Awaiting draw, and once it has been drawn it moves to Past giveaways. The page is read-only, so you can view entries but not change them. Sign in with the same email address you used on the order. If you order with one email and sign in with another, those entries will not show. Entries appear once your payment clears, not when the order ships. If your entries or odds look wrong or missing, email support@shftdco.com and we reply within 24 hours.
Strong odds are still not a win
A big share of the pool is not a guarantee. In a past giveaway the winner held roughly a fifth of the pool, which means four times out of five someone else would have won instead. Odds describe a chance, not an outcome. Buy the piece because you want the piece, and treat the entries as the extra.
How the winner is picked
Before entries open we publish two things: the digital fingerprint of a secret number, and the exact future pulse of drand, a public randomness beacon run by independent groups. Both are fixed in public before anyone enters, so neither entrants nor SHFTD can steer the result. After entries close the secret is combined with that pulse to pick one position in the entry pool, and whoever holds that position wins. The draw runs live, and every entry keeps its own ticket number in a permanent record, with the result published afterwards so it can be checked.