Highest French lotto jackpots are a sight to behold for South Africans

The French Lotto can be an interesting study of the bigger and smaller jackpot prizes won in lotteries around the world.

One of the standout features of this draw is the number of times it happens per week. While lotteries you may be familiar with happen twice per week, the French Lotto draw occurs three times in any given Monday to Sunday period.

That’s an opportunity to win at the start, in the middle and towards the end of the week. In terms of multiples, it equates to a dozen or more draws per month and more than 150 each year. It’s this frequency that makes it quite a popular draw for South Africans and others around the world.

This graphic illustration below shows the payout breakdown of the French Lotto from May 2021 to the same month in 2022. It makes for interesting reading. Take a look at the peaks and dips. Amid the upward and downward curves, note when the biggest wins have happened on the back of a series of rollovers.

As you can see, jackpots often exceed the equivalent of R100 million. Less so, but still relatively often main prizes go higher than R200 million. Every now and then, too, R300 million, R400 million and even R500 million are exceeded. Whopping, life-changing numbers, indeed. Even when they don’t reach such heady proportions, jackpots in the French Lotto are in the 10s of millions of rands in terms of South African value. There was a period in the second half of 2021 when a string of these sub-R100 million prizes were paid out prior to one that exceeded R400 million. A rollercoaster ride, indeed, but one worth going on regardless.

Rollovers, of course, play a big part in the growth of these main prizes. Take, for instance, that jackpot prize of R500 million-plus. It took around three months of rollovers before the huge win. That’s quite a lengthy period, but the wait was worth it.

Entering the French Lotto is straightforward. You are asked to select five digits from a pool of 1 to 49. Then pick an additional number from 1 to 10. To win the jackpot, you have to match the five numbers and that bonus digit.

Interestingly, the French Lotto is among the best when it comes to winning any prize. It presents odds of one in six of winning the prize. By comparison, that’s stronger than the one in 10, one in 12 and one in 13 in the Spanish Lotto, Austrian Lotto and EuroMillions.

The French Lotto is also among the lotteries with the biggest ever jackpots. Its R392 million sits above the record R302 million won in the Irish Lotto, R218 million in the Polish Lotto and R158 million in the Austrian Lotto.

As for winning that main prize, the French Lotto jostles for position with the Spanish Lotto and others for the most likely to produce a jackpot win. Here, the French Lotto odds for the main prize are one in 19 million. That can be compared to the German Lotto’s one in 15 million or Spanish Lotto’s one in 31 million for contrast.