Monday November 14, 2011 : Spanish gamblers have big hearts, and a healthy respect for significant numbers
The good luck superstition surrounding the sequential date of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 2011, which fell into place last Friday, persuaded large numbers of European punters to buy tickets in a special Spanish charity lottery, delivering rewarding revenues to the organisers.
Long queues formed at lottery stands run by ONCE, a charity for the blind whose name means "eleven" in Spanish, in the hope that the numerical quirk of the date would prove auspicious for winning the Euro 11 million main prize.
All of the available tickets were sold at around Euro 5, creating a prize pool of over Euro 60 million, and making available the massive first prize and 11 other top payouts of at least a million Euros, the organisers revealed.