A new lottery has just launched in the UK. Which is a fairly significant event given that the new game is not being run by the National Lottery or Camelot.
The new UK Health Lottery has launched with a blaze of publicity and a whole raft of celebrity endorsements. Perhaps the most significant of which is Eamonn Holmes, who used to present the National Lottery quiz show called Jet Set. Eamonn will now present the Health Lottery live TV draw, he said:
We hope to spread wealth and help with health. It’s exciting and innovative and, like myself, it’s very, very simple.
The new game will be a 5 balls from 50 game with fixed top prizes of £100,000 for every player who matches all 5. There are no rollovers or sharing of prizes. Chief Executive for the Health Lottery, Martin Hall, said:
No prizes are shared. No matter how many people win, everyone will get the advertised prize and there’ll be no roll-overs. I don’t want people not to win the top prize.
EuroMillions came under fire recently for making their game harder to win to ensure bigger rollovers (see EuroMillions changes).
The Health Lottery been designed to give more of it’s profits to local health causes than the UK Lotto. Although early critics have pointed out that only 20% of the £1 ticket price will go to health care causes, whereas 27% of the UK Lotto ticket price goes to good causes. Many feel however that the definition of a ‘good cause’ gets somewhat stretched by the Natonal Lottery.
You can watch the first live draw of the game in the UK on ITV and Channel 5 this Saturday night. It will be a very short 50 second live broadcast made during X-Factor.
Your Comments ↓
Why do you they not give a full prize breakdown on all prizes and tickets sold.
I’m not sure, but it’s early days. The Health Lottery has only had one draw so far, so maybe they will add more stats to their results pages in the coming weeks.