Cook hopes to win P355-M lotto jackpot

MANILA, Philippines—Since his daughter was born seven years ago, William Tolosa has been placing bets in all variations of the lotto, believing that Lady Luck—always frowning at him—might finally wear a smile.

“No one knows for certain what fate has in store for you,” the 35-year-old cook and owner of a Makati City food stall told the Inquirer on Tuesday.

Persistent bettors like Tolosa are the people who keep the sales of lottery tickets booming, particularly those for the 6/55 Grand Lotto, according to Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) General Manager Jose Ferdinand Rojas II.

Rojas expects sales of tickets for tonight’s Grand Lotto draw to “be much bigger” than usual, with the jackpot likely hitting P355 million, compared with the pot of P336 million in the last draw.

“From our experience, sales of Grand Lotto tickets get more robust when the jackpot breaches the P100-million mark,” he said.

The tall, chubby Tolosa, whose food stall is located near the Makati Central fire station, regularly places his bet at a lotto outlet near the market in Barangay Singkamas.

A sorry reminder

Tolosa said he developed the habit of keeping all his losing tickets on top of a cabinet “just for fun”—until recently when, yielding to the nagging of his wife, he threw away the small pieces of orange-colored paper.

“She said they would just remind me how much I have spent, how much I’ve lost on my bets,” he said in Filipino.

Tolosa and all other bettors face awesome odds when they play the Grand Lotto.

Experts estimate the odds of winning the jackpot at one in 29 million—quite formidable when one considers that the odds of being struck by lightning are one in 3 million and of dying from a snake bite are one in 3.5 million.

The odds of drawing a royal flush in poker (10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace of the same suit) are said to be one in about 700,000.

Tolosa has six sets of numbers that he religiously places bets on in every lotto draw.

The results are the same with every draw—the numbers he chooses rarely get picked and the winning combination seems always far from his reach.

Biggest pot

In the last Grand Lotto draw on Monday, the sales of tickets had surpassed P105 million by the time betting stalls closed at 8:30 p.m. For the 42nd consecutive draw, there was no jackpot winner.

A total of 27 bettors came close, picking five of the 06-13-23-32-44-49 combination. They won P150,000 each.

Last year, it took 86 draws before someone—a US-based Filipino vacationing in Olongapo City—snared Philippine lotto’s biggest ever jackpot amounting to P741 million.

Rojas knows how tough it is to pick all six winning numbers.

In the case of the Filipino-American winner, he selected the winning combination through the “lucky pick” method, wherein the computer randomly assigns six numbers to a ticket.

Among the six combinations that Tolosa regularly bets on is a set of numbers based, among others, on the birth dates and ages of the members of his family.

The other combinations are based on numbers connected with his mother and siblings.

According to Tolosa, the combination related to his wife and child only changes when one of them gets a year older.