Hungary's Most Popular Lottery Celebrates 66 Years

The sale of tickets in Hungary's oldest existing lottery game, ‘Ötöslottó’ – in which players should guess the five winning numbers out of 90 – began on February 13, 1957, state-owned gambling company Szerencsejáték Zrt. [literally: ‘Game of Chance Plc.’] said in a statement on Monday.

According to research by the company, the awareness of the ‘Ötöslottó’ among the adult population is almost 100%, with almost half of the population over 18 years of age playing the ‘Ötöslottó’ game regularly, with an average of 3.5 million basic game tickets per week. 

Following the establishment of the current lottery company in 1991 (in the form a Co. Ltd. at that time), the first nine-figure prize was won in 1992, when a melon grower family of twelve won HUF 125,090,951, and some of the winnings were used to provide the police station in Hort, east of Budapest, with a high-end computer to connect its officers to the police data system.

As the millennium approached, in 1999, the billion mark was crossed the 37th week of play of the year, when the HUF five billion lottery jackpot was taken. The top prize of the ‘Ötöslottó’ was taken home in 2020, when a lucky winner won HUF 6.43 billion in the 13th week of the game, the statement added.

Throughout the game's 66-year history, a jackpot of at least HUF one billion has been won on 44 occasions altogether.