Euromillions Roll Down
Sometimes it just isn't necessary to win the top prize in a lottery in order to walk away with a life-changing amount of money. Last Friday's Euromillions draw illustrated this quite clearly. The jackpot was a guaranteed payout of around €130 million, and this mean that there couldn't be a Rollover. Instead, if nobody won the top prize the jackpot fund would Roll Down to the next level that did have winners. Last week that was the second level, there were fifteen winners and each one of them took home €9,839,058!
To me, there is something incredibly appealing about having a whole bunch of people having their lives changes instead of just one or two. Sure, having a hundred million or so has certain advantages, but even a million or two would be more than sufficient for most people to feel the benefit. So why not have a lottery which puts an upper limit on the jackpot and forces the rest of it to roll down to the lower tiers? This would allow more players to benefit and make the lottery itself more appealing.
Although I have spoken rather negatively about the World Lottery in a previous post (see my World Lottery entry for my original comments) I think there is one aspect that I am warming to, and that is the idea of each draw creating "up to 100 millionaires". If the World Lottery could find a way of maximising the number of lives changed rather than focusing on generating increasingly excessive jackpots (that really aren't necessary unless you happen to be an aspiring billionaire who needs a bucket full of millions to get started) then I think I could become a fan of the idea rather quickly.
Of course, right now excessive jackpots are all the rage, so for the time being I will express most interest when guaranteed jackpot payouts make the possibility of a roll down more likely. But one day, who knows? Maybe all lotteries will roll down as a matter of course and give more players more chance of winning a meaningful, though not obscene, amount of money.
Article Last Updated: 02/10/2007 15:34:28
