MADRID (MarketWatch) — “Mil euros.”
If you’re right here in Madrid on Friday, then you definitely received’t go far with out listening to one of many children from the San Ildefonso faculty singing their means by means of the profitable lottery numbers.
This 12 months, the lottery pot, which attracts gamers from everywhere in the world, handed out €2.59 billion — greater than $2.85 billion. An hours-long course of sees the native high-school children sing out profitable numbers which are then verified by officers.
“El Gordo” — Spanish for “The Fat One” — will get its identify from its standing as one of many richest lotteries on this planet. The drawing is at all times simply earlier than Christmas, and blasted out over the airwaves into homes and bars. Usually one can overhear it whereas strolling the streets of any Spanish city.
The drawing at Madrid’s Teatro Real, which hosts opera performances and different cultural occasions, lures in all method of festively attired attendees. All are toting their very own Gordo tickets, after all. Lore has it that the luckiest tickets are these purchased in a bunch, although people have been identified to do a late sprint on Dec. 21 and in some way — magically? — decide up a profitable ticket.
Magic is the operative phrase right here, as a result of the probabilities of profitable at El Gordo have been calculated at 0.001%. There’s a widely known video from David Orden, a professor on the University of Alcalá, northeast of Madrid, who in 2015 delved into the ultralong odds of profitable a prime El Gordo prize.
“People usually don’t see 100,000 things together, so it’s difficult to visualize how small that is,” stated Orden, in a phone interview with MarketWatch in 2016.
Given that there are many smaller Gordo prizes along with the large one, Orden calculated the probability of profitable any prize at about 15%.
As for the 2024 drawing, should you guessed 88008, then fortune and glory are yours. The newspapers in Spain are stuffed with some touching and weird tales — the grandparents who couldn’t purchase presents for the vacations and received €6,000, or the shopping center in Barcelona the place the second, fourth and seventh prizes had been received — it credit a “piedra de oro,” or golden stone, that shoppers rub their numbers over for luck. And then there’s one among Sevilla’s poorest neighborhoods, the place a lottery-ticket vendor will hand out almost €5 million in prizes.
For those that didn’t win a prize, small or giant — and we’re legion — there’s at all times El Niño, or the Extraordinary Child, one other famed Spanish lottery which shall be held on Jan. 6 — the Feast of the Epiphany.
From the archives (December 2016): ‘El Gordo’ and its $2.4 billion jackpot draw crowds to Spain’s luckiest lottery store
Source web site: www.marketwatch.com
