Lottery Trivia
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98 free Lottery trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Lotteries are older than most countries. Keno slips from Han-dynasty China, Roman dinner-party raffles, a 1569 English draw that came with immunity from arrest, and colonial lotteries that paid for Princeton and Columbia all came long before anyone scratched a ticket at a gas station. This quiz covers that whole story, plus the modern games people actually play: Powerball, Mega Millions, the UK National Lottery, EuroMillions and Spain's El Gordo. You'll get questions on record jackpots and who won them, how the odds really work, why the Dutch gave us the word 'lottery', the machine called ERNIE, the Louisiana lottery scandal, and lottery moments from books and film, from Shirley Jackson's short story to Waking Ned Devine. A few numbers questions are in there too, and they are not always the middle option. Difficulty runs from easy to expert, so it works for a pub quiz round, a lottery-night party or just testing yourself. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and related reference pages, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Legend traces the lottery-style game keno to which Chinese dynasty of over 2,000 years ago?
Han
Han: legend credits the strategist Zhang Liang with inventing the game to fund a war, and it is said to have helped pay for the Great Wall, though no Chinese lottery is documented before 1847.
Q 02Which French writer grew rich in 1729 by helping to exploit a flaw in a government lottery?
Voltaire
Voltaire joined a syndicate formed by the mathematician La Condamine to buy up a badly designed state lottery, and his share of the profits is thought to have left him rich.
Q 03Which country's state lottery, running since 1726, is the oldest still in operation?
Netherlands
Netherlands: in 1726 the Dutch state merged a patchwork of separate lotteries into one national draw, and the Staatsloterij has been running ever since.
Q 04Modern lotto descends from betting in which Italian city on which five of ninety council members would be drawn?
Genoa
Genoa chose five officials by lot from 90 candidates and citizens bet on the outcome; the game proved so popular that numbers replaced the names and the state took it over.
Q 05Roman emperors such as Augustus and Nero gave away prizes by lottery during which festival?
Saturnalia
Saturnalia feasts ended with guests drawing lots for gifts to carry home, and every ticket won something, from fine dinnerware to, under the emperors, property and slaves.
Q 06Which English monarch chartered England's first official state lottery in the 1560s?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I chose a lottery over a new tax to pay for harbours and ships, but at 10 shillings a ticket most of her subjects couldn't afford to play.
Q 07What unusual perk came with every ticket in England's first official state lottery, held in the 1560s?
Immunity from one arrest
Immunity from one arrest was thrown in to sweeten the deal, though it didn't cover piracy, murder, felonies or treason.
Q 08From 1612 the Virginia Company of London ran English lotteries to support which American settlement?
Jamestown
Jamestown: the lotteries, drawn across England, propped up the struggling colony for years, but never covered its need for funds before they were stopped.
Q 09A New York lottery authorized in 1746 raised the first funds for which Ivy League university?
Columbia
Columbia: New York's assembly voted the lottery after hearing that New Jersey was about to found the college that became Princeton, and King's College opened in 1754.
Q 10Benjamin Franklin organized a lottery to buy what for the defense of Philadelphia?
Cannons
Cannons: Franklin's lottery paid for a gun battery below the town; by his own account he then coaxed New York's governor, over plenty of Madeira, into lending more.
Q 11Which Founding Father's signature made tickets from the failed 1768 Mountain Road Lottery prized collector's items?
George Washington
George Washington backed the lottery to build a road over Virginia's mountains to a planned resort; it flopped amid a glut of rival lotteries, but his signed tickets now sell for thousands of dollars.
Q 12Which famous memoirist helped launch France's state lottery in 1757, months after escaping from prison?
Giacomo Casanova
Giacomo Casanova, a Venetian fresh from breaking out of the Doge's prison, became a trustee and star ticket-seller of the new French lottery and quickly made a fortune.
Q 13After the Civil War, which state chartered a private lottery that sold tickets nationwide and became a byword for corruption?
Q 21In 2005, 110 Powerball players won second prize together after all playing numbers found in what?
Fortune cookies
Fortune cookies: officials suspected fraud until winners explained that their numbers came from fortunes printed at one New York factory; the payout came to about $19 million.
Q 22Which October 2015 Powerball change led to January 2016's then-record $1.586 billion prize?
A harder jackpot
A harder jackpot: ten extra white balls meant more drawings with no winner, so the prize kept rolling over until three tickets split $1.586 billion in January 2016.
Q 23Where are Powerball drawings held?
Tallahassee, Florida
Louisiana
Louisiana: its lottery company paid ex-Confederate generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Jubal Early to preside over the drawings and lend the 'Octopus' some respectability.
Q 14Which US state launched the first modern state-run lottery in the contiguous United States, in 1964?
New Hampshire
New Hampshire tied its Sweepstakes to horse races at Rockingham Park instead of drawing numbers, to get around federal anti-lottery laws.
Q 15Where was the first modern government-run lottery under the US flag established, in 1934?
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico had held lottery draws under Spanish rule as far back as 1814; its 1934 revival came three decades before any US state followed.
Q 16Which of these casino states is one of only five in the US with no state lottery?
Nevada
Nevada's casino industry has long lobbied against a state lottery as unwanted competition; Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii and Utah are the other four holdouts.
Q 17Powerball was born in 1992 as a rebrand of which earlier multi-state game?
Lotto America
Lotto America became Powerball in April 1992, switching to a then-novel two-drum draw that let it pair long jackpot odds with plenty of smaller prizes.
Q 18In Powerball, what colour is the Powerball itself, drawn from its own drum of 26?
Red
Red: the game is named after this one ball, drawn from its own drum of 26, and matching it alone still wins $4.
Q 19What are the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot on a single play?
1 in 292 million
1 in 292 million: there are 11,238,513 ways to draw five white balls from 69, and 26 possible Powerballs multiply that to 292,201,338 different tickets.
Q 20The $2.04 billion Powerball ticket of November 2022 was sold in which California town?
Altadena
Altadena: Edwin Castro bought the only winning ticket at Joe's Service Center, which earned a $1 million bonus for selling it, and he took his prize as a $997.6 million lump sum.
Tallahassee, Florida: the balls are kept in a vault at the state lottery's studio, where one of several Powerball machines is picked at random and wheeled out for each drawing.
Q 24Mega Millions launched in 1996 under what name?
The Big Game
The Big Game sold its first tickets in six states in 1996; the name gave way to Mega Millions in 2002, when New York and Ohio joined the group.
Q 25Until 2025, what was Mega Millions' $1 add-on that multiplied non-jackpot prizes called?
Megaplier
Megaplier: the optional extra was retired in April 2025, when the ticket price jumped from $2 to $5 and a multiplier of up to ten times was built into every play.
Q 26The $1.602 billion Mega Millions ticket of August 2023 was bought at a Publix supermarket in which state?
Florida
Florida: the ticket was sold at a Publix in Neptune Beach, and the winner chose to take the prize at once, as a single payment of $794.2 million.
Q 27Where are Mega Millions drawings held?
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia: weeks after Powerball staged draws at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Georgia stopped selling it and helped launch this game instead, whose drawings are held at WSB-TV's studios.
Q 28Who presented the television programme for the first UK National Lottery draw on 19 November 1994?
Noel Edmonds
Noel Edmonds fronted an hour-long special in which 49 contestants competed to be the one who started the draw; seven ticket-holders then shared a jackpot of about £5.9 million.
Q 29Which company ran the UK National Lottery from its 1994 launch until 2024?
Camelot
Camelot named its first draw machines Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Merlin; after 30 years it lost the licence to the Czech-owned Allwyn, which took over in February 2024.
Q 30In the TV drama Lost, which character wins the lottery by playing the cursed numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42?
Hurley
Hurley picks the numbers up from a fellow patient who keeps muttering them, and after his win everyone around him meets with disaster, convincing him the jackpot is cursed.