Christmas Millionaire Maker was a special lottery draw that was designed to celebrate the Christmas holidays by creating more millionaires in one night than in any other lottery draw. Tickets were not cheap at £5 each, but because the draw only took place once a year they were popular regardless. The Christmas Millionaire Maker draw hasn’t taken place for the last few years, but there are hopes that it may return, and so we will outline the main game details here for future reference just in case.

Christmas Millionaire Maker was actually two games in one. Both Game 1 and Game 2 revolved around the “drawing” of years rather than numbers, and were played as follows:

Game 1

This first game was very similar to the normal National Lottery game. Players were required to pick five main “years” and the draw selected five main years and a bonus year. A player who matched all five main years won a share of the jackpot or, if they were the only person achieved this feat, they scooped the whole lot – and the jackpot was typically worth around £10 million. Smaller prizes were paid to those players who matched four main years plus the bonus year, four main years without the bonus year, and so on. The lowest prize was £35, and this was given to players who matched just two main years.

Game 2

This game required the player to match two years that were picked for them at random when they bought their Christmas Millionaire Maker ticket. One year was from the “old” millennium (1000 to 1999) and the other from the “new” millennium (2000 to 2999). Anyone who achieved this won a cool £1 million, and although this was undoubtedly a decent prize it wasn’t a penny more than beating the odds of 1 in 1,000,000 deserved.

Overall, the odds of winning a prize in the Christmas Millionaire Maker draw were approximately 1 in 36. Camelot said that for every one million tickets drawn the game would create one millionaire. This, and the fact that the Christmas Millionaire Maker ticket made an unusual Christmas present in its own right, made the Christmas Millionaire Maker draw very successful, at least from a player’s perspective. Let’s just hope we see this game resurrected at some point in the future.