Fans of footie accumulators are going to love the Football Jackpot promotion from Coral, where a bet of just £1 could win you at least a hundred big ones. The jackpot usually runs every week throughout the season and pays out if you correctly pick the win-draw-win outcome of 15 matches, with consolation prizes for getting 13 or 14 winners.
How It Works
The Football Jackpot is actually a form of pari-mutuel betting, which means all of the entry money goes into a pool which is then split up and paid out to the winners, minus a commission that is paid to Coral in exchange for running the competition in the first place.
Each week the prize money will be chopped up according to how much has been bet and then distributed as dividends – so the more people play the bigger the prize fund, and the fewer people that win the more each winner gets. If no one wins, the money rolls over for next time making it an even more attractive bet.
The Prizes
As mentioned above, the amount you win is relative to the number of people who enter and the number of winners – it’s very similar to the way most of the prizes from the National Lottery work. There are three prize brackets you can fall into based on the number of results you correctly predict:
- Jackpot Pool (15/15) – Minimum of £100,000.
- 1st Consolation Dividend (14/15) – Around £50,000
- 2nd Consolation Divident (13/15) – Around £15,000
The actual amounts for each dividend depend on the number of entries for that week – the figures we’ve given are based on the reported wins that Coral have provided on their results page but the actual dividend will vary from week to week.
Just like the dividends, the grand prize for getting all 15 correct is also connected to the number of entries, as well as how long the jackpot has gone without being won – just like a rollover in the lottery, if the jackpot isn’t won the prize money will continue to build until it is hit.
Coral are, however, stating that the minimum value of the jackpot will be £100k – meaning that regardless of how many people enter, you’ll be in for a very nice pay day if you win.
How To Play
If you want to get involved, you’ll need to head over to the Football Jackpot coupon on the Coral website – it’s easy enough to get to grips with. The coupon is made up of 15 matches from which you select the Home Win, Draw or Away Win by clicking the relevant button.
If you select one option from each row then this will count as one line and be multiplied by your stake per line to give a total cost. You can, of course, select more than one outcome for any of the games to give yourself a better chance of winning but each unique permutation will count as another line so it can get costly.
The default stake per line, and the one that most people will wager, is £1, although you can bet up to £20 per line if you wish. The more you bet per line, the bigger the share of the prize pool you receive if your bet wins.
Once you’re happy with your selections you simply have to click the ‘PlaceBet’ button and then cross your fingers that a boat load of money will soon be heading your way.
Winners & Results
When the football jackpot first started, Coral stated that the first single winner would receive at least £1,000,000, with the bookie topping up the funds in the prize pool themselves if needed. This was won on 28th October 2013 by a team from Colossus Bets.
Prior to the big one landing, there were a couple of very near misses, including Kate Muir, the plucky Scottish barmaid who managed to scoop a very respectable £52,000 win for getting 14 correct – and from a single £1 lucky dip, no less.
You can check the results for the Football Jackpot on the Coral website, and they also list the historical outcomes for all of the weeks since it started if you are interested. As well as this there is extra information about the most recent week’s results, including the number of winners in each prize group and the payout they received.