Ithuba announced that the Pick3 game will be removed from the National lottery portfolio from 15 March 2019. All tickets are still available to be validated 365 days from the draw date.
This announcement made much confusion through players because some of them still have tickets valid till 16 March, yet the game end 15th of the current month. For now, we don't have information on how this problem will be solved. What is sure is that all winning tickets will be respected within a year.
The game is probably canceled due to presenting a new game called Daily Lotto . As Ithuba said on their facebook profile - players want a daily game in National Lottery portfolio. For many players, terms and conditions of Pick 3 were very hard to understand. Lotto is a much easier game to play. Still, some players claim that Pick 3 is discontinued, because the game had too high chances of winning.
Some stats
I have made some stats about this game:
- Pick3 was available from 2016-12-06 to 2019-03-18, making it one of the shorter-lived products in South African lottery history.
- There were total 831 draws of Pick3 results.
- Game draws were unavailable during Christmas days.
- Most Recurring Triple: 2 - 2 - 2 (occurred twice).
- Triple Zero (0-0-0): Occurred on 25.04.2017 (Draw 0142).
- Triple Two (2-2-2): Occurred twice, on 27.04.2018 (Draw 0507) and 18.02.2019 (Draw 0803).
- Triple Seven (7-7-7): Occurred on 17.08.2018 (Draw 0619).
- Triple Three (3-3-3): Occurred on 24.11.2018 (Draw 0718).
- Pick3 successor: Daily Lotto.
It is statistically interesting that Triple Two appeared twice in the final year of the game, while popular numbers like Triple Eight or Triple Nine never appeared in the entire 2.5 year history.
Source: Nationallottery.co.za