EuroMillions Celebrates with £88 million draw
Update: Nobody matched all five main numbers and two lucky stars to win the jackpot so the money rolled-down to the next prize tier of matching five numbers plus just one lucky star. That meant 14 players shared £89,986,000, giving them nearly £6,989,367.40 each at odds of just 1 in 5,448,240!!! Of those 14 winners, 6 are from the UK, 5 from Spain, 2 from France and 1 from Belgium.
Euromillions lottery players are bracing themselves for a guaranteed jackpot payout of around £88 million (€130 million) this Friday 28 September. Ordinarily, Euromillions players have to match five main numbers from 1 to 50 and two Lucky Star numbers from 1 to 9 to qualify for the top prize, and if no such winner is found the jackpot is rolled over to the next draw. This week, however, no rollover of the jackpot fund will be allowed, so if nobody wins the top prize the jackpot fund will “roll down” to the next highest prize tier which does have winners.
Guaranteed payout draws are always very popular with Euromillions players, and with such a large jackpot prize up for grabs, this Friday’s draw promises to be no exception. Commentators are advising people to buy their tickets as early in the week as they can in order to avoid a last-minute rush on Friday. Previous draws with guaranteed payouts have seen tickets purchased at a rate of 1 million per hour, so queues at the premises of lottery retailers look certain to be lengthy as we near the end of the week.
The past couple of months have been very good for British Euromillions players in particular. On Friday 10 August Angela Kelly won a jackpot worth £35.4 million and became the biggest UK National Lottery prize winner of all time. Then, a couple of weeks later, on Friday 31 August, another British player won £26.5 million. Although both of these wins are extremely impressive, they are a far cry from the £88 million that could be won by a single player this Friday. In fact, even if two winners share the top prize, both of them will beat Angela Kelly’s record win.
The odds of landing the top Euromillions prize are 1 in 76,275,360, but if no winner is found then it is likely that the fund will be shared by players who match 5 main numbers and just 1 Lucky Star number, and the odds of achieving this are 1 in 5,448,240. Whilst no jackpot winner would mean that the prize will be shared between a larger number of people, £88 million goes a long way, and if there are 88 or less second tier winners then every single one of them could still walk away from the game as a millionaire.
The biggest Euromillions jackpot so far stands at €183,573,077. This was shared between three jackpot winners in February 2006. The biggest Euromillions winner so far is Dolores McNamara from Ireland. She won €115,000,000 in July 1995 and traded her modest bungalow in for a mansion.
- 24th September, 2007. |
