KSPO fuels Korean baseball fever with new lottery events

By Ko Dong-hwan

The Korea Sports Promotion Foundation (KSPO) has introduced new lottery events to boost the popularity of the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) League, the country’s professional baseball league.

Sports Toto Korea, a private lottery business operator commissioned by the KSPO, launched a promotion event from Friday to April 20. The promotion came a day before the new baseball season kicked off on Saturday.

Sports Toto Korea launched the promotion on its online platform, Betman. The promotion features three different types of events, offering online betting credits to raffle winners. Participants who place bets on the platform automatically become eligible for the random draw.

An official from Sports Toto Korea said the promotion event will hopefully encourage more people to enjoy baseball.

“We’ll keep introducing various promotion events to spread healthy sports betting culture across the country,” he said.

Sports Toto Korea will announce the winners of the promotion’s raffles on Betman on April 25.

The company reminded participants that online money prizes will become invalid if left unclaimed within seven days of the announcement.

The promotion includes several events: predicting the outcome (win, draw or loss) of a single game, with 1,000 raffle slots; predicting which of the KBO's 10 clubs will win the championship series, with 500 raffle slots; and offering a certain amount of online betting money to new members or those returning to Betman after a period of inactivity.