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Germany goes crazy for pounds 15m jackpot

Steve Crawshaw
Friday 02 September 1994 23:02 BST
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TRAFFIC jams at the border, non- stop queues in the newsagents and front-page headlines. The drama has seized the whole country. Germany is in the grip of lottery fever, and tonight it may go collectively delirious.

There have been a few winners of petty cash - like Lothar L, who last week won the equivalent of pounds 1.6m and prepared to buy a Lamborghini. But for the first time, nobody has hit the jackpot for nine weeks. The money in the kitty has thus risen to a record DM35 ( pounds 14.5m), tax-free.

The excitement has mounted too. Last week 27 million lottery forms were filled in - more than twice as many as usual. Those who have never played before have become infected. In the words of Die Woche: 'A country is going crazy'.

The mass-circulation Bild complained yesterday of 'heartless' bosses who are refusing to let people play the lottery during office hours. Mathematics professors are interviewed at length, with serious advice on how to maximise one's chances of success. Meanwhile, politicians have called for the system to be changed, to increase the individual's chances of winning, while reducing the overall size of the jackpot.

But there is little support for such a party-pooping idea. Both the regional governments (who make billions of marks from the lottery scheme) and the punters want the big-money jackpot to stay.

The enthusiasm has spilled beyond Germany's borders, to The Netherlands and Austria - allegedly contributing to traffic jams at the border. An Austrian bus driver was asked this week why he was crossing into Germany with an empty bus. The answer should have come as no surprise: 'I must quickly fill in my lottery form.'

Everybody in Germany now knows that the chances of hittingthe super-jackpot are 1 to 140 million, but nobody can resist the temptation to have a go. Somebody, after all, has to win - and soon.

This correspondent's reports may in future be filed from the Caribbean island he plans to buy.

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