What's New On These Pages: November 2018

Next month: December 2018

• Wednesday 28th November
  The free Lucky Dip I won last Wednesday went into this draw and, yep, it won yet another free Lucky Dip! That's 10 free Lucky Dip tickets and a £25 3-match win since 20th October - crazy stuff. Yet again, I had to estimate Wednesday ticket sales (same estimate as last Wednesday because both were reset to £2m jackpot prize pools).

• Tuesday 27th November
  No free Lucky Dip last weekend for a change, but today I put in the first main Lotto ticket sales figure since the prize changes last Wednesday. I also filled in an roughly estimated ticket sales figure for last Wednesday's draw, but deliberately rounded to the nearest 100,000 to make it clear it's a rough estimate. Remember that when the jackpot is reset (2m on Wed, 5m on Sat I believe) after the previous draw had a won jackpot, all individual prizes are fixed amounts, making it impossible to closely estimate the ticket sales for that draw.

  I also corrected a long-standing bad assumption that 5+bonus prizes get rolled over if they're not won (I've no idea where I got that from). This meant I had to regenerate every single individual main Lotto prize page.

• Wednesday 21st November
  I'm really freaking out that I got yet another free Lucky Dip ticket tonight (9 of them in 4.5 weeks now). I doubt I'll ever see this streak of free Lucky Dip tickets again.

  I now no longer display main Lotto raffle info on the home page or on any individual main Lotto page from tonight's draw onwards. I also don't auto-scrape the official site's draw details page for raffle info any more.

  It's now become tough (impossible?) to reverse calculate the main Lotto ticket sales for a draw that follows the previous draw that had a won jackpot (like tonight's draw because last Saturday's draw had 2 jackpot winners). The new game procedures don't seem to explain how the jackpot prize pool is reset for the draw following a jackpot win. Tonight had no jackpot winners, but the jackpot prize pool was reset to a "mysterious" £2m not mentioned in the procedures.

  With every tier for tonight's main lotto draw having a fixed value individual prize, there's no way to reverse calculate the ticket sales. For rollover draws, though, it looks like (ignoring Camelot's boosts to guarantee a minimum £1m per jackpot winner or any rare capping that might take place) that the jackpot prize pool is the unwon jackpot prize pool from the previous draw plus 9.79% of the ticket sales for the latest draw.

  So the ticket sales for a rollover draw are:

  ( The jackpot prize pool for the rollover draw minus
  the rollover amount from the previous draw )
  mulitplied by 100
  divided by 9.79

  If there is a jackpot boost or cap, though, it appears that it'll also not be possible to reverse calculate the sales figures for any draw where that happens.

• Saturday 17th November
  Unbelievably, I won another 2 free Lucky Dip tickets tonight, which means I have 3 tickets in next Wednesday's draw for the third consecutive week. Eight free Lucky Dips and a 3-match win in 4 weeks - quite remarkable.

• Thursday 15th November
  I've been having a crazy run of six free Lucky Dip wins in the last 3.5 weeks and then topped it off last night with a £25 win. The sequence went like this (I set my free Lucky Dips to be played on the following Wednesday draw, plus I have a ticket for every draw via Direct Debit):
  • Sat 20 Oct 2018 - 1 free Lucky Dip
  • Wed 31 Oct 2018 - 1 free Lucky Dip
  • Sat 03 Nov 2018 - 1 free Lucky Dip (meant I had 3 tickets for the following Wed!)
  • Wed 07 Nov 2018 - 2 free Lucky Dips (first time that I'd ever done that - also 3 tickets the following Wed again)
  • Sat 10 Nov 2018 - 1 free Lucky Dip
  • Wed 14 Nov 2018 - a £25 3-match win (won by a free Lucky Dip!)

  Previous month: October 2018
  

  

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