I’m not sure how many of you follow the EuroMillions Lottery game, but it is big big big over here. Last Friday’s game was a 100 million Euro jackpot! That’s a lot of cheddar.
To answer your first question…no, we didn’t win. If we had won, I would have tacked on a few extra exclamation points in the title. So why am I writing about this? Well, it turns out that the winner is from right here in Almuñécar!
Normally, we don’t play, or even follow the lottery, but I happened to go to a birthday party, and it was the hot topic of conversation. I guess it’s the talk of the town, and if the Winner is following our blog, hooray for you!
So will we start playing? As residents of Spain (and by extension, Europe), we are eligible to play, but I was curious at what the odds are of winning El Prize-o Grande (not its real name). I did some checking, and here are some interesting probabilities:
| Event | Odds |
|---|---|
| USA winning the 2014 World Cup | 1 in 114 (I'm thinking that's high) |
| Average person living in the US being struck by lightning in a given year | 1 in 600,000 |
| Flipping a coin and getting heads 20 times in a row | 1 in 1,048,576 |
| Being dealt a Royal Flush | 1 in 649,740 |
| Winning the Powerball Lottery | 1 in 175,223,510 |
| The chance of an average person living in the US being struck twice by lightning in a year | 1 in 360,000,000,000 |
Where do the odds of winning the Euro Jackpot fit in? The odds of matching all five balls and the 2 Lucky Stars to win the Jackpot is:
1 in 116,531,800
With those less than stellar odds, I’m thinking that we will not be playing, but you can always donate to Wagoners Abroad. The odds of getting some useful information, or even a chuckle are quite high!