| Make sure you
buy at least one ticket this week for Saturday’s
triple rollover jackpot worth an estimated £20
million (but likely to be more). If one ticket
wins this prize they could be the biggest ever
single-ticket winner of the National Lottery.
At the moment that record stands with Paul
Maddison and Mark Gardiner who won £22,590,829
back in June 1995, and then Iris Jeffrey, from
Belfast, won £20,100,472 on 14 July, 2004.
The biggest-ever National Lottery Jackpot was
worth £42,800,610 and was shared by three
tickets in January 1996. Jackpots tend to be
smaller now than in the early days of the National
lottery as on-the-whole we buy fewer tickets,
but events such as this triple rollover (this
is only the second one ever) usually get us
out into a ticket-buying frenzy, so the jackpot
pool swells even more.
If this weekend’s draw has no jackpot
winners then it’ll be good news for those
who match five numbers plus the bonus. This
is because of an odd rule for the National Lottery,
which states that there can only be a maximum
of three rollovers. After that the jackpot gets
split amongst the next tier of winners (in this
case those who’ve matched 5 balls, plus
the bonus this Saturday). So although your chances
of winning are the same as normal, if you do
win, it’ll be a higher value prize.
Ask yourself, would you risk a £1 of
your money to win £2, or £20m? If
the odds were the same, you’d think it
was worth the risk to win £20m but not
£2. That’s the psychology behind
us all entering to win these insanely high jackpot
prizes. We know we’ve got a cat-in-hells
chance (1 in 14 million actually), but the up
side is so fantastic we ignore the down side
(which is, we are very unlikely to win!).
Age is no barrier to being a jackpot winner,
Gracie Vera Coulson aged 87, and Tracey Makin
aged 16 both won jackpots of over £1m.
The first triple-rollover was on 29 May 2004
and the jackpot reached £22,158,516, so
let’s see what happens on Saturday 14
October 2006!
12 October 2006
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