Why Do Competitions Ask a Skill Question?

Because without one, a paid competition decided by chance is a lottery, and running an unlicensed lottery is a criminal offence. The question is doing legal work, not testing you. If it felt insultingly easy, you've read the situation correctly.

By Mitch Barnes · Last reviewed 21 October 2026

Full disclosure: we're one of the sites selling tickets, and we don't use a skill question at all. The reason is below.

This covers the law in Great Britain: England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland has separate gambling legislation.

The question has one job, and it is not testing you

You pay, you pick C, you're in. Nobody checks whether you thought about it, and the site would prefer you did not.

Pay to enter, win by chance, and the Gambling Act 2005 calls the arrangement a lottery. Lotteries need a licence from the Gambling Commission. The operators you buy tickets from do not hold one and are not applying for one, so something has to stop the arrangement being decided by chance alone, and in a prize competition that something is meant to be the question.

So the question stands between the site and a criminal offence. That's its entire job: moving one arrangement into a different legal category before any money changes hands. Not finding the sharpest entrant. Not making the thing feel like a game of wits. How prize competitions work sets out that architecture end to end, and prize competition law covers it clause by clause.

What the law actually asks

Section 14(5) of the Gambling Act 2005 runs to three lines, and those three lines are the entire test. A process requiring skill, judgment or knowledge gets treated as relying wholly on chance if:

• it cannot reasonably be expected to prevent a significant proportion of people who enter from winning a prize, and
• it cannot reasonably be expected to prevent a significant proportion of people who want to enter from doing so.

Read the "and" carefully. Both limbs have to be true before a question is written off as chance, so turning it round, a question survives if it does either job: putting people off entering, or stopping entrants winning. One is enough. That single conjunction is the difference between a test almost nothing passes and a test a decent crossword clue clears.

That sounds generous until you look at what a question has to do to manage either. Deterring people means being hard enough that a meaningful number read it and give up. Preventing winners means a meaningful number get it wrong. A four-option question about the colour of a post box does neither. Most people answering one can feel it, which is probably why you're here.

Nobody has defined "significant proportion"

Not the Gambling Act 2005, which uses the phrase twice inside s.14(5) and never says what it means. Not the Gambling Commission, whose guidance on free draws and prize competitions, last updated on 23 October 2024, does not use the phrase at all. Twenty-one years after the Act, there is still no figure.

What the Commission does say is sharper than a percentage. An organiser has to be able to show the skill required will discourage entry because it is too difficult, and will stop some entrants winning. The 2024 guidance then names the format directly: multiple choice questions, and questions that give you another go after a wrong answer, rarely meet the test.

That is the hole the industry stands in. No number exists, so nobody can prove they have cleared a line nobody has drawn, and s.14(5) has never been tested in court against a paid competition site. Anyone telling you with confidence that their question passes, or that a rival's fails, is guessing.

What passes, and what obviously doesn't

Graded against the two limbs. These are question types, not quotes from anyone's site.

The question	Deters entry?	Stops winners?	Where it stands
Four options, one obviously right ("What colour is a London bus?")	No	No	Very unlikely to qualify. The Commission names multiple choice as rarely sufficient
The answer printed in the text directly above	No	No	Very unlikely to qualify, and visibly so
One question, answerable by a quick search	No	Very few	Weak. Searchability alone isn't fatal, but nothing else here is doing any work
Wrong answer lets you try again	No	No	Very unlikely to qualify. Named in the Commission's guidance
One question needing real specialist knowledge	Some	Some	Arguable, and depends entirely on the audience it's put to
A puzzle with several clues to solve	Potentially	Potentially	Potentially qualifies, depending on difficulty. The format the Commission's examples treat as sound
Judged creative entry, like a photo or a slogan	Potentially	Potentially	Potentially qualifies, depending on the judging process
A tie-breaker applied after a chance draw	No	No	Doesn't automatically rescue the arrangement. Skill has to genuinely affect who can win

Read down the right-hand column, then look at what you're actually asked on a UK competition site. It will usually be one of the top four.

That is less damning than it sounds. Most paid sites run two things at once, a skill question and a free postal route. One operator's own published guide describes the standard UK model in exactly those terms, a paid-entry draw with a question and a route, both under the Gambling Act 2005. Another markets itself as skill-based and still runs a free postal route on every competition. The route carries the legal weight. The question is extra.

Googling the answer doesn't break it

Worth knowing, because it's the opposite of what most people assume. A question doesn't stop counting as skill just because you could find the answer online in ten seconds. Research is a form of effort, and the law doesn't require the knowledge to come out of your head.

What kills a question is different. The answer being common knowledge, so no research is needed at all. Or the answer sitting on the same page as the question. Those remove the effort entirely, which is a different thing from making it easy.

In practice the distinction matters less than it sounds. The questions that get set are usually common knowledge, not merely searchable.

If the question is too easy, what then?

If it's the only thing standing between a paid draw and lottery law, the arrangement is a lottery, run without a licence, and the offence belongs to the operator. Not to you. You haven't done anything wrong by entering, and the prize isn't tainted in your hands.

That's a narrower category than it first looks. A site with an easy question and a genuine free route is leaning on the route, so the exposure sits with sites that have neither.

Your practical risk is what a prosecution would do to a business holding your money and your undelivered prize. An operator shut down mid-competition owes you a draw it can no longer run. What the law covers and what it doesn't sets out where that leaves you, and whether a raffle counts as gambling covers the lottery side in full.

This is why most sites do not rely on the question at all. The free entry route is the other way out of lottery law, set out in Schedule 2 paragraph 8 of the same 2005 Act, and it has what s.14(5) lacks: conditions you can check. A genuine free way in. No more expensive and no less convenient than paying. Publicised so it reaches people before they enter, and going into the same draw. Free postal entries is the detail.

How NetCompetitions handles skill questions

We do not ask one. Not on any competition, and the word "skill" appears nowhere on this site.

Our competitions are prize draws run under the free-entry exemption. Every paid competition carries a free postal route into the same draw with the same chance of winning, and the arrangement stands or falls on that.

That is not principle. It is choosing the exemption that has a definition. Schedule 2 paragraph 8 of the Gambling Act 2005 sets four conditions a free route must meet, and we can be measured against every one. Section 14(5) sets two, and defines neither. One of those is a standard. The other is a hope. You can see how it works and check the free route on any live competition page.

The test you can run yourself

Next competition page you open, three things, in this order.

1. Read the question and answer it. If you knew it instantly, or the answer sits on the same page, the question is decoration.
2. Look for the free entry route. If it's there and genuinely usable, the question was never carrying the weight anyway, and the site is on firmer ground than the question suggests.
3. If there's no free route and the question is easy, that site is relying on something that probably doesn't hold. That's its risk to run, and yours to decide about before you pay.