Euromillions Won’t Roll Over

Winners news: Indeed, the draw took place on September 28th amid much fanfare. Low and behold, nobody did match the required 5 main numbers and 2 Lucky Stars. So the jackpot did roll down to the next prize tier of matching 5 plus 1 Lucky Star. This produced 14 winners in the UK (6), Spain (5), France (2) and Belgium (1). The prize for each player was £6,989,367 or €9,839,058.

The Euromillions lottery jackpot for the draw on Friday 28 September is worth €130 million (around £88 million), and every cent of it will be paid out to players because the usual “rollover” rule has been suspended.

Rollovers normally occur when no player succeeds in winning the top prize by matching 5 main numbers (from 1 to 50) and two supplementary Lucky Star numbers (from 1 to 9), but for some special draws the rollover protocol is suspended so that players can enjoy a “guaranteed” payout of the whole jackpot fund.

Friday’s draw has been declared one of these special draws, so even if no player wins the jackpot, the money will shared by the winners at the next highest level – that is, those that match five numbers and only one supplementary lucky star number. If there are no winners here, the money spills down to the third prize level, and so on. In other words, no matter what happens, the €130 million jackpot fund will be won in one way or another.

Euromillions draws that guarantee to pay out the entirety of the jackpot fund are always very popular, and for good reason. Whilst players still have a 1 in 76,275,360 chance of hitting the top prize, if nobody does this then they have a 1 in 5,448,240 chance of getting a share of the second tier prize. Even if there were a few dozen such winners (there are generally fewer than a dozen for a typical draw) then a prize fund of €130 million would still see all of them become multi-millionaires. And of course, the odds of a player winning any prize at all are still an impressive 1 in 38.

The thing that appeals about guaranteed lottery draws is that somebody somewhere must win the jackpot fund. There might be a single jackpot winner, several jackpot winners or a larger handful of second-tier winners, but someone entering this Friday’s Euromillions lottery will certainly become rich – and probably beyond their wildest dreams. Will it be you? In a few short days you’ll find out for sure...