National Lottery: Ticket warning given ahead of record-breaking £57.8m Lotto jackpot draw

At least one person is guaranteed to win the National Lottery on 9 January, with the Lotto jackpot estimated to be £57.8m ($84.2m) after no one correctly picked the six winning balls, leading to a record-breaking 14th consecutive rollover. New rules mean if nobody matches all six numbers in the forthcoming draw, with the prize exceeding £50m, the money will be shared between those who managed to pick five balls and the bonus ball.

The £57.8m jackpot is the largest sum of money ever offered by the game, and if only one person wins, they would amass a bigger fortune than some of music biggest stars such as Coldplay's Chris Martin, who is worth £52m and Kylie Minogue, estimated to have £55m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2015. The jackpot is so huge, a single winner would potential also have more money than Ed Sheeran (£20m), Ellie Goulding (£13m), Jessie J (£13m) and Olly Murs (£10m) combined.

The excitement has resulted in a rush of people purchasing tickets for the draw, with the National Lottery claiming it was selling around 200 tickets a second prior to the draw on 6 January, resulting in the company apologising for its website crashing as a result of the high number of visitors.

As a result, the National Lottery is advising people to purchase their tickets early to avoid disappointment. Tickets are available online until 7.30pm on 9 January.

The reason for the long streak of the jackpot not being claimed may be down to Camelot, who own the UK National Lottery, increasing the number of numbers to select from by 10 in October 2015. This change in rules means the chances of winning the jackpot stand at one in 45.1 million, compared to the previous odds of one in 14 million.

However, those chances will improve greatly if the money is shared around the winners on the next prize tier of five balls and on the bonus ball, with the odds standing at one in 7.5 million.

The previous jackpot record was £42m, which was shared between three people in January 1996, leaving them with £14m each. The largest prize ever won on a single Lotto line was £22.5m banked by work colleagues Mark Gardiner and Paul Maddison from Hastings in 1995. The biggest individual win came courtesy of Iris Jeffrey from Belfast, who won £20.1m in July 2004.