Record Lotto Jackpot Must be Won on Saturday
Last Updated: Thursday 7th January 2016, 12:12
A record Lotto jackpot of £57.8 million must be won on Saturday after it rolled again on Wednesday night. Either all six main numbers will be matched by one or more players at the weekend or the full prize amount will drop into the next winning prize tier, most likely shared between those who match five main numbers and the Bonus Ball. This means that your chances of winning a share of the top prize this Saturday become much more favourable - from 1 in 45,057,474 to around 1 in 7.5 million.
A raft of Lotto changes were made in autumn, which included scrapping the old four-rollover limit that had been in place since the game launched in 1994 and introducing a new rule stating that the Lotto jackpot could only roll over once after it hit £50 million. This has allowed the game’s top prize to reach levels not witnessed for well over a decade and is the reason that the pot must be distributed on Saturday, potentially creating a number of multimillionaires.
In addition, ten more balls were added to the pool at the same time. Whilst this lengthened the odds of claiming the top prize, the launch of Lotto Millionaire Raffle, which guarantees to award at least one player with £1 million in every draw, actually increased the likelihood of you becoming a millionaire. You now have an approximately 1 in 10 million chance of pocketing an amount of seven figures or more, depending on ticket sales. In the three months since the relaunch, there have been four jackpot winners and a staggering 63 players have banked £1 million.
Although the October Lotto changes were seen as controversial in some quarters, the imaginations of lottery fans have been captured by the promise of the riches on offer, with estimates that 200 tickets a second were being snapped up in the final hour before Wednesday’s draw. If sales were to continue at that rate, with the option to buy online open from 8am to 11pm every day, closing at 7:30pm on Saturday, there could be another 29.8 million tickets purchased before this weekend’s draw, contributing a further £29.8 million to the overall prize fund! A big ticket surge could even see the jackpot nudge closer to, or even over, £60 million!
If you were to pick up the full jackpot on Saturday, you would be more than £15 million better off than the three winners of the previous largest Lotto jackpot combined. They shared £42 million in the draw on 27th January 1996. You would be worth more than double the biggest prize won so far on a single ticket, £22.5 million claimed by two business partners from East Sussex in 1995, and find yourself nearly three times as wealthy as Lotto’s current biggest individual winner. Iris Jeffrey from Belfast scooped £20.1 million in July 2004 and celebrated by buying a washing machine!
Residents of Romford in east London, Sunderland and Newcastle should make sure they have acquired their tickets for Saturday’s draw as they are said to be the luckiest areas in the UK in terms of lottery wins of more than £50,000. However, the Birmingham postcode contains the most lottery millionaires, so that could be the place to head if you want to keep Saturday’s gigantic win to yourself!
Lotto tickets are on sale now online and from authorised retailers. If you need any help choosing the perfect winning line, use the Lotto Number Generator and select as many random combinations as you would like to play in Saturday’s exciting big money draw.