Cinema enthusiasts are currently waiting for the next episode of the “Die Hard” franchise with Die Hard 5 – A Good Day To Die Hard being released on 14th February 2013 . Lottery enthusiasts might be forgiven for naming Saturday 12th January 2013 as “A Bad Day To Win The Lottery” !.
Eagle eyed Lottery fans will have noticed that the payouts for Saturday’s UK Lotto draw were much less than normal for a Saturday Lotto Draw .
Take for instance the actual jackpot amount – matching six main balls on Saturday 12th January was rewarded with £ 278,365 as eight ticket holders shared the £ 2,226,920 jackpot . On the previous Saturday matching six main balls would have returned £6,277,131 and the Saturday before that matching six main balls would have returned £2,147,580.
The sums for the next level down are also worth comparison – matching five main balls plus the bonus paid £ 17,569 on Saturday 14th January but paid £ 77,862 on Saturday 5th January and £ 264,317 on Saturday 29th December.
The other noticeable figure was the number of winners claiming the lowest prize of £10 for matching three main balls – on Saturday 12th January there were 845,945 winners in this category compared to 501,356 and 404,608 the previous two Saturdays.
The reason for this anomaly ? experts surmise that this was due to the actual Lotto numbers – 03-07-11-12-24-27 all being under the number thirty one and the public typically picking their Lotto numbers to represent birthdays and anniversaries all of which fall into the sub-31 category .
The knock on effect was that in order to pay the guaranteed £10 to ticket holders matching three main balls this diminished the pool of money available to the other tiers , which in turn had a high number of winners due to the low numbers drawn – a perfect storm .
The moral of the story ? make sure you play the Lottery every week an don’t forget to check the Lottery results at LottoCentral !
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