National Lottery: Two ticket holders to share record £66m Lotto jackpot

Two players shared tonight’s biggest-ever Lotto jackpot, and each ticket-holder will be starting 2016 £33 million richer.

But in the end two ticketholders would be the ones having their lives changed as they went halvers on the £66m jackpot, which was higher than the initial estimate of £57m.

The previous jackpot record was £42m, which was shared between three ticketholders in January 1996.

It came the same day as Americans flocked to get tickets for a record jackpot of about $950 million in the United States’ Powerball draw.

In the hours before the draw, the National Lottery website crashed as people made a last-minute attempt to buy tickets.

Millions of tickets are thought to have been sold.

Britain launched its national lottery in 1994.

Players are being urged to check their tickets, and Saturday’s numbers were as follows: 26, 27, 46, 47, 52 and 58.

The increased number of balls in the draw reduced the odds on a player’s six numbers coming up from about one in 14m to one in 45m.

The 259 tickets which matched five main numbers each win £1,309 while 17,695 matched four numbers to win £123.

The numbers pulled for a prize of €250,000 were 6, 7, 20, 25, 29, 34 and the bonus number was 22. The company said it had expected to sell at least 400 tickets per second online and in shops in the hours before sales stopped last night. The jackpot comes after 14 consecutive rollovers found no victor, the BBC reported. It was the biggest prize in the competition’s 21 year history.

On Wednesday, the prize was £50.4 million – and tonight stands at £57.8 million.

The new rules guaranteeing there would be a payout were brought in for the first draw after a jackpot reaches 50 million pounds.

Nobody won the Lotto Hotpicks jackpot which uses the same numbers as Lotto.