EuroMillions Mania
Update 4/2/06: The £125 million, record-breaking
EuroMillions jackpot was shared by three ticket holders following
the draw on Friday night. Two winners live in France and one in
Portugal. Each ticket holder wins €61,191,026 or approximately £41,740,000.
Camelot, which runs the competition with operators in the eight
other countries, said "sales had gone up by 1200% on a normal
week. Over the last 12 weeks £15m has been raised good causes
from EuroMillions alone". The shared prize leaves Delores McNamara,
see below, as the biggest single winner with £79 million.
Probably the world's biggest ever Jackpot of £125 million
(183 Million Euros) could be won on 3 February 2006. The EuroMillions Lottery draw has now not been won for the last 11 Fridays. Players
and the media everywhere are weighing up just what a win of this
value would equate to.
If a single UK winner nets this prize they will
straight away be in the Sunday Times Rich List top 100 people (unless
they sensibly opt to remain anonymous). With the money they could
buy up all the 2,300 Wimbledon Tennis 5-year debenture tickets currently
on sale (and still have change); or buy a 10-year Wembley Stadium
season ticket for themselves and 700 mates; more likely they would
want to sail away in a Fraser Yacht on sale at £54m and waiting
for them in the South of France, which should leave a bit of time
to look at Updown Court in Surrey, a 103-room mansion worth £70m.
Every lottery would love to claim theirs as the
World’s Biggest, but you usually need to look to the US for
such an accolade. For instance, the Powerball Lottery run in the
US had a record $340m won by the West family from Oregon in December
2005. Usually in US lotteries, winners choose either a one-off cash
payment worth approximately half the total jackpot value, or they
pick an annual-payment annuity. The West family took a one-off cash
payment of $164m (£92m), which was divided up between nine
family members.
The previous biggest Euromillions jackpot of "just" £79
million was won by Grandmother Delores
McNamara from Ireland. Marion Richardson from Gateshead is the
UK's biggest single Jackpot winner of a Euromillions prize; she
won £16.7 million in April 2004 just after the lottery started.
EuroMillions lottery was launched in 2004 and is
operated by Camelot in the UK, and lottery operators in France,
Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.
You must buy a ticket in one of these countries (and claim your
prize in that country) and be aged over 18 to play. Tickets can
be bought on the high-street at any National Lottery outlet or online
on their website. Your chances of winning the Jackpot are over 76
million to 1, but that’s because you have to correctly select
5 numbers between 1 and 50, and two star numbers between 1 and 9.
How to play EuroMillions .
The numbers drawn on Friday 27 January when the
jackpot stood at £105 million were: 9, 15, 21, 40, 49 and
the Lucky Stars were 1, 4.
The deadline for buying tickets for this £125 million rollover
jackpot draw is 7:30pm Friday 3 February (but get there earlier
as there may be a queue), and the draw will be shown on Challenge
TV at 9.55pm, although the actual draw takes place earlier than
that.
The jackpot can only roll over once more before hitting the newly
imposed maximum number of rollovers
which would affect players of the game on 10th February. If no one
wins the Jackpot fund (of a hitherto unknown value) then, the Tier
2 winners will share it.
- 31/01/2006
|
