Big Draw 2000

Game 1

Winning years drawn at 9.37pm GMT on Friday 31st December 1999:

Sorted order:  1901  1918  1950  1958  1986  Bonus:  1903

Drawn  order: 1986  1950  1918  1958  1901  Bonus:  1903

The table below is courtesy of Camelot's phone line (0845 9 100 000 *114).

Category      Prize       Winners       Total      Percentages
Jackpot             £0           0            £0       0.0%
4+bonus     £3,563,220           2    £7,126,440      24.1%
4 match         £2,514         237      £619,518       2.1%
3+bonus         £2,815         319      £897,985       3.0%
3 match           £184      14,859    £2,734,056       9.2%
2+bonus           £172      10,744    £1,847,968       6.2%
2 match            £43     381,468   £16,403,124      55.4%
Totals                     407,629   £29,629,091     100.0%
Ticket sales                         £80,601,805
Actual tickets sold                   16,120,361

Both Game 1 4+bonus prizes have been claimed.

Game 2

Winning years drawn at 12.47am GMT on Saturday 1st January 2000:

First year:  1575  Second year:  2832

Number of Game 2 jackpot (£1 million) winners:  16

Number of Game 2 jackpots claimed so far:  14 (2 unclaimed as of 29th June 2000)

Notes:

• The average prize in Game 1 was £72.69.
• Game 1 was messed up - the machine got stuck whilst trying to emerge from the rather dubious concept of a split video wall and they had to hold the draw deep inbetween the banks of the video wall ! Alan Dedicoat read out the fourth ball (1958) wrongly initially - he said it was 1985 and then had to correct himself. To top it all off, the draw started 12 minutes later than its heavily-advertised 9.25pm GMT time.
• Game 2 was steeped in confusion - four machines were used and Alan Dedicoat kept looking at the wrong one, so there was a big delay to read out the numbers and, even worse, he read out the fourth ball (32) before the third one (28) and completely missed the second ball (75) - Dale Winton had to tell him about that one. Game 2 also bizarrely took place 12 minutes late like Game 1 did and the standard 7-ball music was played when Alan Dedicoat read out the two years again, which was also strange.
• Annoyingly, ITV teletext had the full results before 9.00am GMT on Saturday, which was when Camelot re-opened their phone lines to the public. It was somewhat unfair that they got preferential treatment and also a bit surprising that BBC teletext did not have the full results before 9.00am too, especially since they broadcast the two draws live of course.
• It's lucky that the rules allow for the Game 1 jackpot tier to roll over into the 4+bonus tier, otherwise it could have been a bit embarrassing...
• Camelot had estimated ticket sales at £125 million and Game 2 jackpot winners therefore totalling 25, but they fell over 35% short of this, which meant that the draw was a failure in terms of participation.
• The official lottery site Web maintainers obviously don't know about the automatic generation of graphics, so they ran this script (a dreadful piece of repetitive coding - haven't they ever heard of loops ?!) to generate two directories (bonus and non-bonus) containing 2,000 GIFs each ! And after all that, a typical GIF wasn't even transparent, ho-hum...
• Note that the pairs of years for Game 2 were generated in scrambled blocks of 1 million pairs (each 1m block had no duplicate or missing pairs) and then issued in that scrambled sequence as each was ticket bought. This is how they could guarantee that one and only one ticket would win for every 1 million tickets sold (though there was a remainder of 120,361 tickets in the 17th 1m block that failed to produce a jackpot winner).
• A 500-member syndicate from the News of the World newspaper has won one of the £3.56m Big Draw 2000 Game 1 jackpots, but only two members of the syndicate have come forward to claim their prize so far.
• My Game 1 years were manually picked by adding "19" to the front of my normal lottery first ticket's six numbers, but I didn't match a single year sadly. Game 2, randomly selected by the lottery terminal, resulted in the numbers 1042 and 2392 on my ticket, which unsurprisingly also lost, so that's me predictably £5 out of pocket.
• Prizes in Games 1 and 2 had to be claimed by 11.00pm BST on Thursday 29th June 2000, so two £1m Game 2 jackpots expired and have been added to the Good Causes fund.

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