The big news in Canadian lottery is that a new game, called Lotto Max, started and the first draw was held on September 25, 2009.
If you follow Canadian lotteries, you might be interested to know what the ticket sales and payouts were for the first draw.
This article takes a look at these stats.
You can tell how popular a lottery game is by the amount of ticket sales.
Although Lotto Max doesn't publish what the exact sales were for each draw, it is quite easy to calculate based on the number of prize winners.
For example, matching 3-out-of-7 numbers wins a free ticket and, on the first draw, there were 471,416 free tickets won.
The odds of matching 3-out-of-7 numbers are 1-in-8.
1 and multiplying these two numbers together will show how approximately how many tickets were bought.
That means that 3,818,470 Lotto Max tickets were purchased for the first draw.
At $5 per ticket, the game generated more than $19 million in sales.
$19 million in ticket sales is a pretty good number, but who knows if the game will remain popular? Ticket sales might have been high because it was the first Lotto Max draw and was highly publicized.
Perhaps that will fade out in the future.
Or maybe not.
Perhaps ticket sales will increase as the jackpot amounts increase.
The first draw had a $10 million jackpot.
Maybe ticket sales will be even higher as the jackpot approaches $50 million.
The bad news is that if you played the first Lotto Max draw, you didn't win the jackpot.
I know that because nobody won it.
Because there were no winners, the jackpot amount increased to $15 million for the next draw.
The second prize was more than $235,000.
Nobody won that either.
40 winning tickets matched 6-out-of-7 numbers to win the third prize of $5900 and 2595 tickets matched 5-out-of-7 numbers to win the fourth prize of $113.
If you play Lotto Max, good luck to you in your quest to win some money!