Overview of Prize divisions in Lotteries
A lottery is always associated with a Jackpot amount followed by its minion prizes. Lottery prizes are usually divided into different divisions, Jackpot being the first division which consists of the highest amount that the Lottery product can offer. Lottery products determine the number of divisions and the probability of winning being low for the first division jackpot amount and increasing for the lower divisions. This blog explains about Prize divisions in Lotteries with a few examples.
Jackpot
Jackpots for a lottery product start from a base amount defined by that product and increase each draw until won. Odds of winning the jackpot are low, but we will learn about how one can win with different combinations in the next section.
Before understanding that, let’s look at a few Lottery products and the odds of winning the jackpots on playing 1 standard game:
- Australian Powerball: 1 in 134,490,400
- US Powerball: 1 in 292,201,338
- EuroMillions: 1 in 139,838,160
Increase in the jackpot amount brings in more excitement to the customers and the lottery ticket sales soar during those periods.
Considering Australian Powerball as an example, Jackpots start from $4 Million and have reached a massive $200 Million in the past!
Prize Divisions
Apart from the Jackpot prize, every lottery product will have different divisions based on winning combinations. To understand the prize divisions, let’s consider Australian Powerball and explore what it offers in terms of prizes:
Winning Combinations
To play a Powerball game, you would need to select
- 7 standard numbers (between 1 and 35)
- 1 Powerball number (between 1 and 20)
As we see above from the winning combinations, Division 1 or Jackpot is won by someone who matches 7 standard numbers & 1 Powerball number.
If you just match all the standard numbers, but not a Powerball number, you would win a Division 2 prize and so on with different winning combinations.
As discussed already, the odds of winning vary and are higher as you move lower in divisions. Prize amounts vary with divisions and usually, you can find a significant change between a Jackpot amount (Division 1) and a Division 2 tier. Below is an example of a draw from Australian Powerball depicting the Prize amount and number of winners between each division:
Prize Divisions
Conclusion
Winning combinations is one of the major factors for the popularity of any Lotteries product. Many of the draws might result in no one winning the jackpot, thereby making the upcoming draws an exciting one for the customers.
