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November 15th, 2006

05:12 pm - It's The Big One! If you can recognise which of the many people who have doubtless said "It's The Big One!" over the years I like to quote, award yourself considerable smugness. The EuroMillions lottery draw rolled over for an eleventh consecutive week last week, so a special stipulation comes into play. It cannot roll over for a twelfth consecutive week, so all the rollover funds are guaranteed to be paid out this week. If there's no jackpot winner this time, the rollover fund will be split among the winners of the second prize. This means that there may very well be a situation where more is paid out in prize money this week than is taken in from entry funds. If that wouldn't be a good reason to play the lottery, I don't know what would be. Of course, the chance that you'll lose is as just high as ever, and if you win one of the smaller prizes, your smaller prize is going to be about the same as usual; it's just that in the unlikely but nevertheless possible incident that you hit the top prize awarded, which does not necessarily have to be the jackpot, then it'll be much higher than usual - and that makes the lottery more worthwhile playing. ( In short, you should buy a EuroMillions ticket as long as the estimated jackpot doesn't reach £124,000,000. ) ETA: Didn't win the jackpot. In fact, nobody did. As hinted at in 2) above, 20 people each won the 5+1 prize, which worked out at around £6½ million or €9.65 million each, which is a pretty handsome chunk o' change. Happily, 7 of these 20 winning tickets were British, though only something like 15%-25% of the entries normally are. (Apparently this time we bought second most tickets behind only France, and France only had 4 big winners to our 7. Hurrah!) I think my assumptions about exchange rates may have been a simplification too far. The number of tickets bought was probably between 120,506,199 and 134,293,684 and the jackpot pool ended up being £123,232,395, which (if anything) looks a little low. Hopefully more detailed figures released in coming days - possibly requiring a country-by-country breakdown, alas - will permit more detailed analysis. Current Mood: geeky Tags: gambling, games, lottery, mathematics, probability

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