Vernons Easy Play #1 (Super Draw #1)

8 Easy Play score draws on Saturday 15th August 1998:

Manchester United      2-2   Leicester City      
Queens Park Rangers    1-1   Bristol City        
Swindon Town           1-1   Sunderland          
Tranmere Rovers        1-1   Portsmouth          
Luton Town             1-1   Preston North End   
York City              1-1   Gillingham          
Hamilton Academicals   1-1   Airdrie             
East Stirlingshire     1-1   Brechin City        

[A full set of fixtures for this game is also available]

The table below is courtesy of Camelot's phone line (0845 9100000 *114).

Category       Prize        Winners        Total       Percentages
8 draws   £2,000,000.00           1    £2,000,000.00       87.0%
7 draws       £2,034.00          38       £77,292.00        3.4%
6 draws         £137.00       1,125      £154,125.00        6.7%
5 draws           £5.00      13,252       £66,260.00        2.9%
Totals                       14,416    £2,297,677.00      100.0%
Ticket sales                           £1,530,691.00

• The average prize was £159.38 and one in every 106.2 tickets won a prize (=0.94% of players).
• This was the 1st Super Draw and the jackpot pool was a guaranteed £2,000,000.00.
• Yes, Vernons made a loss of £766,986 on this first game because of a £2m guaranteed jackpot !
• In case you didn't know, all individual prizes are rounded down to the nearest 50p (it's just that all of them conveniently rounded down to a whole pound this week).
• ITV teletext page 123 only displayed the home team for the Vernons Easy Play score draws and also failed to indicate how many winners were in the lower tiers.
• BBC teletext "hid" the Vernons Easy Play results in sub-page 3 of 4 on page 312 at the weekend (i.e. they are not in their lottery pages 555-559) and by Monday seemed to have completely removed the results from their pages, which is pretty outrageous !
• Sky One teletext page 155 has the Vernons Easy Play results on sub page 2, although it doesn't mention "Vernons" or "Easy Play" at all (instead calling it "The National Lottery Football game"). No prize/winners tiers at all here, although the total prize pool ("£2.3m") was quoted.
• In a complete "cheat", Channel 5's teletext page 113 subpage 2 is actually absolutely identical to Sky One's results page ! Obviously the same teletext company is maintaining both sets of pages.
• So, to summarise, none of the teletext services are displaying both the full prize and winners tiers (BBC and ITV teletext do so for the main UK lottery) and none of them displayed the ticket sales, the total number of winners or even the exact scores of the drawn games. All of which are available on this site of course...
• You might also be interested to know that one of the largest UK Sunday newspapers, The Mail on Sunday, covered both the main lottery and soccer pools but didn't say a single word about the Easy Play results ! I've been told that Vernons put an ad with the results into The Sunday Express (a less popular paper) and the paper itself also had results near to its soccer pools section.
• Vernons have launched an official Easy Play Web site, but it's pretty poor - one page and no results until October 1998 ! Sort of gives new meaning to the word "useless"...
• Unclaimed prizes from this game expired at 11.00pm GMT on Thursday 11th February 1999 and have been added to the National Lottery Distribution Fund.

Next game: #2 (Saturday 22nd August 1998) [421 jackpot winners]

© Richard K. Lloyd & Connect 1999
Part of MerseyWorld - promoting Liverpool and its surrounding regions
Auto-generated at 5.23pm GMT on Saturday 13th March 1999