Euromillions 20 Multi-millionaires!
Last Updated: Friday 16th January 2015, 10:05
The Euromillions draw held on Friday 17 November was a particularly memorable one because it failed to produce a single jackpot winner for the twelfth week in a row. Under Euromillions rules, the £120 million jackpot fund could not be rolled over to a thirteenth draw and therefore had to be distributed to winners of the second tier prize (achieved by matching five main numbers and one of two Lucky Star numbers). There were 20 such second tier prize winners, and this meant that they each collected a cool £6.7 million - not bad at all for second prize!
The lack of a top prize winner meant that anyone who had summoned up the courage (and the wealth) to buy every possible combination of numbers would have actually won the whole jackpot prize fund. This would have required the purchase of 76,275,360 tickets at a cost of £1.50 each, for a total outlay of £114,413,040. Assuming a win of £120,000,000, the brave player would have made a profit of £5,586,960, a figure which represents a 4.88% return on their investment. Find a bank or building society that would pay that amount for such a short space of time and we'd love to hear from you!
Of course, there would have been downsides to buying every possible combination besides the cost involved. First, if the jackpot had been won by even on other person, the venture would have created an enormous loss for the investor. Winning just £60,000,000 instead of £120,000,000 would have meant losing £54,413,040, or 47.55% of the total outlay. More than one other winner would have cost the speculator an even greater amount.
And then consider the logistics of buying 76,275,360 tickets in the first place. If our hypothetical investor had set aside six full days to buy the required tickets, and they were somehow able to function 24 hours a day without a break, they would have needed to buy 529,690 tickets an hour! That's 8,812 tickets per minute or 147 tickets per second. When you look at the problem from this perspective it seems even more intimidating than being able to raise the required £114,413,040 in the first place.
Predictably, no individual bought every possible ticket and so, as we said earlier, the jackpot rolled down to the 20 second tier winners. 7 of these were from the UK, 4 from France, 3 from Spain, 3 from Portugal, 2 from Ireland and 1 from Belgium.