Middle-aged are dominating list of Lottery winners too often

The Lottery has come into the headlines more and more.

However, your chances of winning it if you are not a middle-aged Darby and Joan appear to be slim, given the number of middle-aged couples who have won it. There appears to be very few people who are younger or older that are not in the middle-aged bracket.

You would want to be living in a cave not to notice a very distinct pattern developing. It is not always the case, but more often than not, middle-aged couples seem to be doing better than those outside of this group. Even with the recent winner in the UK of the Euro lottery, they too appear to be a middle-aged couple, just like previous winners. Other anomalies also seem to be sticking out like a sore thumb. We have retailers who boast that they have sold more than one jackpot winner within a short period. This is extremely difficult to fathom or believe, given the mathematical odds of selling two jackpot winners, which are astronomical.

Then we have those who are giving accurate predictions that the Lottery will be won on such and such a week, and even go so far as to say what county it will be won in, which has happened in the case of the Irish National Lottery.

Too many of these rumours have been spine-chillingly accurate. It is also remarkable that the number of smaller prizes won each week can fluctuate to extreme levels; some weeks there are just a handful of smaller prize winners and other weeks there are very high numbers winning very small prizes that barely cover the price of a ticket.

It is also notable that very few people are winning the penultimate prize of five numbers plus the bonus ball. It is surprising why more people do not come very near to winning the jackpot, instead of the scarcity of winners in this area and none at all some weeks.

There is also the question of why more individuals do not actually ‘share’ in the jackpot given the millions that play it who are not in a syndicate? To beat all, though, we have all these quirky and intriguing stories surrounding the winning tickets and chance discoveries. How many more jackpot winners are going to discover, purely by accident, that they have won who are not middle-aged?

Maurice Fitzgerald

Shanbally

Co Cork