Thousands of Britons who missed out on this weekend’s £66m Lotto jackpot have turned their attention to a draw in the US that is offering an eye-watering $1.3bn (£900m) top prize.
The UK jackpot, which accumulated due to 14 successive rollovers, was shared by two winning ticket holders who guessed all six numbers. The prize pot was the highest since 1996, when three winners shared a jackpot of £42m.
Those figures are dwarfed by the US Powerball lottery, operated across 44 states by the Multi State Lottery Association and which has not been won since 7 November. This weekend’s rollover means the jackpot for Wednesday’s draw stands at a record $1.3bn.
However, the chances of winning are even more remote. The UK draw’s odds of one in 45 million are also dwarfed by the US lottery organisers’ odds estimate of one in 292 million. Or as Jeffrey Miecznikowski, associate professor of biostatistics at the University at Buffalo, told Reuters, the equivalent of flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.
“It doesn’t sound so bad … but you would be at it for an eternity,” Miecznikowski said.
One company selling tickets for the US draw to British hopefuls said it had seen exceptionally high demand. “The $1.3bn is immense, unbelievable, insane, and people are going crazy over it,” said Martin Rosmann, a representative of the Lotter, which sells tickets for Powerball and scores of other lotteries across the world. “A lot of people in the UK and all other countries are really going for it.”
Rossman said they had sold 55,000 tickets, including thousands in the UK, for the Saturday night draw, and expect to sell many more for Wednesday. “Powerball no winner” was a trending topic on Twitter on Sunday.
The US lottery, which accepts non-US players, has rules about tickets being bought and winnings collected in the same state, so the company has a US office that buys paper tickets on behalf of online buyers, and collects minor prizes of under $25,000.
Winners of more than $1m, are offered the option of travelling to the US to collect their winnings in person. Rossman said the company had recently arranged for one customer to collect $6.4m – “but given the situation in his part of the world he had a little difficulty sorting out his visa first”.
Rossman said he would be excited if one of Lotter’s customers won the big one on Wednesday – but said he would not be buying a ticket himself, in accordance with company policy.
An estimated 47 million tickets were sold for the UK’s Lotto draw on Saturday, many of these in the final hour before entries closed. There were reports of queues at many newsagents, and of the lottery website struggling under the strain of visitors. Camelot, the lottery organisers, said that at the height of the ticket fever sales were running at over 400 a second.
New rules meant that the jackpot could not rollover again, so the entire sum had to be shared. This meant the outright win by two ticket holders was particularly bad news for the five people who got five numbers and the bonus ball and won a relatively miserly £64,426.
Ian Walker, professor of economics at Lancaster University management school, said lottery organisers had to strike a balance between the chances of winning and the size of jackpot, as easy games had boring prizes, while harder games were too frustrating.“Without rollovers, this is a very boring game,” he said.
