According to Woody Allen, “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” So – do you have a EuroMillions ticket with the numbers 3 – 15 – 17 – 28 – 33 and lucky stars 2 and 4 lined up across the front, and valid for last night’s draw? If you do – then prepare yourself, as they ‘say in all the very best fairy stories, to “live happily ever after” because you’ve just copped yesterday’s first prize EuroMillions jackpot worth a stunning $71,141,917 – that’s SEVENTY-ONE MILLION, ONE HUNDRED and FORTY-ONE THOUSAND, NINE HUNDRED and SEVENTEEN dollars.

Another 5 players matched 5 mains and 1 star to take $178,038 apiece; 11 players matched 5 mains to pocket $48,556 each and 88 more players pulled in $3,035 each for matching 4 mains and both lucky stars!

Seventy – one million dollars is enough booty to buy nearly 3,000 compact cars; if stacked up, the pile of greenbacks would meaasure about 40 feet high, 80 feet long and 48 feet wide – as a single stack of dollar bills it would stand 24,000 feet high! To quote Michael Caine, “not a lot of people know that”, so file this stuff away into the receesses of your mind and be ready to wow your audience at your next bar quiz night!

The big money lottery games to look out for today are Powerball with a first prize worth $250,000,000 and the Indiana Hoosier Lotto with $33,000,000 up for grabs. Of course to get a slice of the action you’ll need a ticket, and the place to get that is right here at WinTrillions, where you can play the biggest and richest lotteries in the world!

According to practically every single news bulletin throughout the world, The Republic of Greece, AKA, The Hellenic Republic the “cradle of western civilisation,” currently has a bit of a cash flow crisis, is little short of the readies and is struggling to pay its debts! Aren’t we all?

However, being Greek didn’t bring any financial solace either to film maker Costis Mitsotakis, who is the only Greek inhabitant of the Spanish village of Sodeto. This is the tiny village tucked away in the municipality of Alberuela de Tubo, Huesca, Spain where the entire population of 70 households, decided to pool their resources in order to buy tickets for Spain’s biggest lottery – El Gordo and then won first prize – a staggering NINE HUNDRED and TWENTY-THREE MILLION dollars – yes you did read that right $923,000,000 which meant that the minimum every household walked away with was $132,000 apiece!

All except one that is, no prizes for guessing the missed household – right first time – Costis Mitsotakis! Sadly it appears that when his neighbours were going around every house in the village persuading people to buy El Gordo lottery tickets, Mitsotakis, who lives in a barn half a mile outside Sodeto, mistakenly got overlooked.

Fortunately not all is doom and gloom for Mitsotakis, as he had been trying to sell some land without much success, It now appears that after learning of their lottery win, a neighbour called to say he would buy it and now more neighbours have put in offers on the land; however Mitsotakis doesn’t want any bad feelings in such a small village and has refused to get into a bidding war! He sounds like a very nice guy indeed!

Spain is of course noted, amongst other things, for its addiction to big money lotteries and raffles and with just over 1 day to go before the next Spanish Special Millionaire Raffle is due to be drawn, then this weekend is no exception. Up for grabs is a very tasty ONE HUNDRED and TEN MILLION dollars, which should help a little until your next payday! To be in with a chance of winning, you need a ticket and the place to buy a ticket for tomorrow’s Special Millionaire Raffle is right here at WinTrillions!

Divination is the art of foretelling the future or the discovery of hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers. Just in case you reckon you need all the help you can get to pick a lottery winning line and feel that divination might be the next best thing since sliced bread, here’s a few methods you might like to try!

Toss a coin, throw dice, pick cards from a playing card deck; even bibliomancy. This is the system of using your favourite book or even the Bible to pick your numbers – the method is simple – just open the book to any page and then use numbers found on that page. Bernie Bobowicz of Clifton, New Jersey was going through his mother’s old Bible and saw some numbers. Then he got a funny feeling — a voice inside telling him to play those numbers. He won $7 million in the New York Lotto.

Unfortunately divination didn’t seem to help any Powerball players over the weekend as nobody matched 5 – 33 – 41 – 54 – 59 and Powerball 13 or they would now be $120 million richer; that said 3 players did grab ONE MILLION bucks each by matching 5 mains and another 37 players raked in TEN grand apiece by matching 4 mains and the Powerball.

No outright winner means only one thing – another rollover! The next Powerball draw will be played on Wednesday Feb, 1 and to whet your appetite for divination the jackpot has now climbed to ONE HUNDRED and SEVENTY MILLION dollars ($170,000,000) now that’s enough to cover your stay at the brand new Shahi Mahal Presidential Suite at Raj Palace, Jaipur, India for the next 4,250 nights (food extra)!

The only drawback to making your reservation at the Shahi Mahal is you probably need to win the jackpot first and to win that – you’ll need a ticket; however you don’t have to be a divination guru to know that you can buy your ticket for the next Powerball draw from right here at WinTrillions where you can also buy tickets for many other of the world’s biggest and richest lotteries!

Queue dramatic cliff-hanger music – location; Iowa Lottery Headquarters – background plot – less than 2 hours to spare before the claim deadline of 4 p.m. Dec. 29, 2011 was due expire, New York attorney’s acting on behalf an unnamed winners trust finally made it to the Iowa Lottery offices to stake their multi-million dollar Hot Lotto jackpot claim with a ticket bought from a petrol station in Des Moines, Iowa, USA, for the game drawn on Dec. 29, 2010.

Fast forward to last week’s meeting with Iowa Lottery investigators – the claimants lawyers refuse to answer ANY questions about the ticket’s ownership and are given until 3 p.m. today (Friday Jan. 27, 2012) to reveal the true identity of the winner or winners or the multi-million dollar Hot Lotto jackpot payment will be refused.

Wow – a standoff big style, just wait until Hollywood gets onto this – the streets outside Iowa Lottery headquarters emptying faster than a shot dog through a barn, people diving for cover, the two protagonists eye-ball to eye-ball, (queue “musical pocket watch music” – as played in the movie For a Few Dollars More) in readiness for the 3 p.m. shootout – who blinks first – loses!

The outcome: the New York attorney blinks first – withdraws his claim by fax and agrees to “take no further action to enforce the claim.”

The twist: in order to ensure the integrity of the lottery, Iowa Lottery CEO Terry Rich, asks the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation and the Iowa Attorney General to investigate the attorney who made the original claim as it needs to know just how the law firm obtained the ticket to make sure it wasn’t stolen and that a valid player bought it and whether those involved complied with state law.

What happens to the unclaimed loot? It now goes into the pot toward future prizes! Phew – be still my beating heart!

Peace of mind: whenever you buy your lottery tickets at WinTrillions you won’t ever have to worry about missing a prize deadline, dropping a result, losing your ticket or having it stolen, as we write your name across every ticket, email you with a scanned copy, keep it safely and securely on your behalf, check your numbers and help you with the claim process when you win!