When a national lottery is won, or someone correctly calls a large set of football results during the 3 o’clocks, it’s always seen as a rare and almost immaculate triumph for the victor. People will claim that they just got lucky.
In South Africa, however, the sports-loving, lottery-binging general public has now seen two of its long-shot jackpots split across several players. Strangest of all, several of the numbers picked in both games would generally be labelled as defying common wisdom, and yet the two jackpots were shared between 62 players.
So, is there something to the South African method of picking betting numbers, or was it all a tremendous coincidence?
42 people correctly call 13 football scores
Source: Pixabay
Of course, the UK occasionally sees someone or a couple of people announce that they’ve won a long accumulator, but those rarely exceed ten to 12 games due to the selection and payout caps. In South Africa, the National Lottery Operator, Ithuba, runs a 13-match prediction game which spans the elite leagues of European football. Called the SportStake 13, they pitch it as the top tier of their sports predictions offering.
On 10 December, the ZA draw’s governing body announced that its R1.5 million (£76,000) jackpot had been won, with someone predicting all 13 of their selected matches on 5 and 6 December. They then revealed that this tremendous feat was in fact achieved by 42 players, 22 of which predicted the results manually. The 13-match call won each of them R36,000 (£1,800).
The matches spanned the Bundesliga, La Liga, Ligue 1, Premier League, and Serie A, with a fair few odd results being called by the 42 predictors. Eintracht Frankfurt and Borussia Dortmund produced a draw – as did Bayern Munich and RB Leipzig – Cadiz got the best of Barcelona, and the high-flying Real Sociedad were held by Deportivo Alavés. An aspect that almost certainly helped was that there were only three draws.
20 people call the 45-ball lottery
Source: Unsplash
The month of December has certainly been an odds-defying one for South Africa. Not only did a massive 42 players of a football prediction game call 13 correct results in one outing, but 20 more people guessed all five of the national lottery numbers, with one of them also choosing the right Powerball to make it a six-ball triumph.
With so many winners, the jackpot was split down to portions of R5.7 million (£279,000) per correct number caller. The numbers, however, were as unpredictable as they were widely selected, with the sequence being 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, with a Powerball draw of the number 10 ball. It’s possible to participate in lottery betting on SA Powerball from outside of South Africa – for example, in Ireland. Via this means, people bet on the numbers they think will come up without “playing” the lottery directly as they could if they were in South Africa. This means there were likely others who won some money by predicting the same outcome. However, the number of winning tickets in SA itself is still quite the phenomenon.
As a general rule to playing the lottery, you’re advised to avoid popular numbers like the number seven, or sequences of numbers. This is primarily because so many people run with those picks. As we’ve now seen in South Africa, when the randomised games produce these coincidental numbers, which is just as likely as any of the other one in 42 million shots, many players stand to split a hefty jackpot.
On both occasions in South Africa, commonly-chosen betting numbers came up trumps. The apparently unlucky number of 13 matches was correctly called by many, and the sequence around the lucky number seven made 20 new millionaires.
