It is a stroke of luck to match 5 numbers in a lottery but when 4000 other people do the same, you don’t feel much like lottery winners.
The odds must be extremely high for something like this to happen but thousands of people were left bitterly disappointed after the UK National Lottery draw on Wednesday 23rd March 2016. It turned out that as there were 4082 people who all picked 5 numbers, these lottery winners walked away with £15 each!
A spokesman for the National Lottery said; “We had an unprecedented 4,082 Match 5 winners tonight.”
“To put it into context, the four Lotto draws before this one had 55, 36, 61 and 38 Match 5 winners – so over 4,000 Match 5 winners is highly unusual.”
This fact of course will not go very far in making people feel any better at the fact of only walking away with £15. Can you just imagine the excitement they would have felt when they saw that they had matched 5 numbers? Yes they would not have expected millions but definitely more than £15.
That being said though, it is a lottery and that is part of the thrill. Not necessarily and enjoyable part, but a part of it nonetheless.
To make matter seven worse, people who matched 3 and 4 numbers walked away with more money than the other lottery winners.
114,232 people matched just 3 balls, which meant they walked away with £25 each. While the 7,879 ticket holders who matched four numbers, won a slightly healthier £51.
The reason why so many people were playing with the same lucky numbers was because 5 of the 6 main numbers from the draw were multiples of 7, (7,14, 21, 35 and 42), which is obviously a popular choice among those wanting to be lottery winners.
How would you feel if you matched 5 numbers in a lottery and only won £15?