The Lotto draw has now raked up an unenviable half-century of rollovers as the National Lottery jackpot remains unwon.
The 50th consecutive rollover occurred on Wednesday night when there was no winner of the €19,060,800 jackpot which has been capped since September 29th.
The jackpot has not been won since June 9th. The current jackpot rollover is unprecendented. The longest previous streak was 22 rollovers in a row.
According to UCC mathematician Dr Michael Cronin the chances of a rollover on a Wednesday night are 87 per cent (13 per cent the prize will be won) while the chances of a rollover on a Saturday night are 84 per cent as more tickets are sold for that draw. This is based on average ticket sales over recent weeks.
This means that the Lotto jackpot should be won on every sixth or seventh occasion it takes place.
The chances of 50 successive jackpot rollovers is in the order of 2,500 to one.
The National Lottery said last week that lottery sales were commercially sensitive and it would not be verifying or disputing Dr Cronin's numbers.
The previous longest streak without a jackpot winner ended in a €12.7 million prize claimed by a Kilkenny family syndicate in April.
The Lottery regulator states that while the current jackpot is “experiencing a particularly long roll – the opposite can also occur: eg the jackpot was won three Saturdays in a row in late May/early June 2021”.
Fine Gael TD Bernard Durkan recently generated a good deal of comment when he highlighted that the draw had not been won since June.
He described the draw as “unwinnable” and questioned how long the public would continue to buy tickets if there was no jackpot winner soon.
He called for the lottery regulator to come in front of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance to explain why the jackpot had been outstanding for so long.
The winning numbers of Wednesday night’s draw were 3, 15, 19, 23, 31 and 39. The bonus number was 5.
