How do you match five lottery numbers and win just £15?
Lotto ticketholders with five numbers in Wednesday's draw won less money than those who matched only three, earning them just £15.
Camelot said it was an "extremely rare" situation but "it is a lottery at the end of the day".
On Lotto, the prizes for matching two numbers and matching three are a fixed amount:
a free Lucky Dip for Match 2
and £25 for Match 3
They are the only prizes on Lotto that are fixed.
Once the Match 2 and Match 3 prizes are paid out, the other prize tiers are allocated a certain percentage of the remaining prize pot:
Match 4 gets 12.9%
Match 5 gets 2%
Match 5+Bonus gets 1.9%
Match 6/Jackpot gets 83.2%.
This amount of money must be shared equally by the number of winners in each prize tier.
In the case of last night’s draw, there was £61,230 available to be paid out to Match 5 winners.
However, because there were an unprecedented 4,000-plus Match 5 winners – so around 80 times higher than the usual 50 or so winners that we would normally expect to see for the Match 5 prize tier – they had to share this amount of money.
Camelot said it was an "extremely rare" situation due to five of the six main numbers drawn being multiples of seven – 07, 14, 21, 35 and 42 – and clearly this is a hugely popular set of numbers.
The four previous Lotto draws before this one had this many Match 5 winners: