Spanish Christmas Lottery

The Spanish Christmas Lottery (officially Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad [sorˈteo estɾaorðiˈnaɾjo ðe naβiˈðað] or simply Lotería de Navidad [loteˈɾia ðe naβiˈðað]) is a national lottery. It has been organized every year since 1812 by a branch of the Spanish Public Administration, now called Loterías y Apuestas del Estado. The name Sorteo de Navidad was used for the first time in 1892.

The Spanish Christmas lottery is the second longest continuously running lottery in the world. This includes the years during the Spanish Civil War when the lottery draw was held in Valencia after the Republicans were forced to relocate their capital from Madrid. After the overthrow of the Republican government the lottery continued uninterrupted under the Franco regime.

As measured by the total prize payout, the Spanish Christmas Lottery is considered the biggest lottery worldwide. In 2015, with 18 million pre-printed €200 tickets to sell, the maximum total amount available for all prizes would be €2.52 billion (70% of ticket sales). The total prize for the first place El Gordo ("the big one") jackpot would be €720 million.

Since 2011, the Spanish Christmas Lottery is based on tickets ("billetes") which have 5-digit numbers, from #00000 to #99999. Since this system only produces 100,000 unique ticket numbers, each ticket number is printed multiple times, in several so-called series ("serie"). The series is also identified on each ticket by a series number. In this way, the lottery organizer is able to sell more than 100,000 tickets each year, numbered from "Series 001 Ticket 00000" through "Series xxx Ticket 99999", where xxx is the total number of series printed in a given year.

For example, in 2015, there were 180 series of 100,000 tickets each, for a total of 18,000,000 tickets available at €200 each. If all €3.6 billion of tickets were sold, there would be €2.52 billion (70% of ticket sales) available for prizes.

Because the €200 ticket price may be prohibitive for many purchasers, each of the pre-printed tickets is actually a perforated tear-apart sheet of 10 identical sub-tickets ("décimos"), available for €20 each. Each sub-ticket is entitled to 10% of any prize that the ticket has won.

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Wikipedia