How Have Irish Players Fared in the First 1,000 EuroMillions Draws?
Friday evening may not have produced a EuroMillions jackpot winner, but there was cause for celebration as tickets holders across the continent witnessed the game’s 1,000th draw.
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Ireland may have only joining the EuroMillions party ahead of the 35th draw, but that hasn’t stopped players in the Emerald Isle enjoying their fair share of success over the years. In total, there have been 43.9 million winning ticket holders from across the nation who have scooped a combined total of over €1 billion.
It took less than a year for the country to make its mark on the pan-European lottery scene, as Dolores McNamara became the biggest jackpot winner in Irish and EuroMillions history when she landed a prize worth €115.4 million in August 2005. Although the record for the largest prize in the game’s history has since been broken a number of times, the former cleaner remains the winner of the largest prize in the country’s history by some distance.
To date, 2.7 percent of all EuroMillions prizes won have been claimed by Irish ticket holders, a figure that puts the nation ahead of Luxembourg (0.5 percent) and narrowly behind Austria (3.8 percent) and Switzerland (4.1 percent). The jackpot winners’ table is currently topped by France and Spain, with the two nations racking up 167 wins between them. The UK (65), Portugal (64) and Belgium (28) occupy the remaining places in the top five on the leaderboard.
The 1,000th draw also gave potential future winners the chance to reveal all. A survey commissioned to celebrate the event found that 36 percent of players will happily rely on their lucky or regular numbers in order to help them land the jackpot, while just 4.7 percent admitted to studying the game’s statistics beforehand. However, selecting numbers at random proved to be the most popular method when it came to deciding on digits, with almost 6 out of every ten players opting to take this route. The statistics also reported that 70 percent of players would remain anonymous should their numbers come up and only 23 percent would quit wok.
Friday’s draw itself saw 50,341 lucky Irish ticket holders successfully pocket sums ranging from €4 for matching two main numbers to €3,043 for matching four main numbers and both Lucky Stars. For a complete breakdown of prizes and additional draw information, visit the EuroMillions Results page.
If you would like to become the 11th Irish jackpot winner and claim a €45 million top prize in the 1,001st EuroMillions draw, you can pick your numbers online or play via any authorised retailer throughout the Republic. Good luck!
24th April 2017
