Lottery Numbers - 1,2,3,4,5,6

[Vonhelmet]

Unless someone else wins as well, and you have to split it, so you will make a loss if you get less then 14 mill

I once worked out (I was a lonely teenager with a lot of time on my hands) that if you bought about 8.4m tickets, your expected winnings would be equal to your costs.

I think that's about the number I came up with anyway.

 

[DaveF]

I once worked out (I was a lonely teenager with a lot of time on my hands) that if you bought about 8.4m tickets, your expected winnings would be equal to your costs.

With the possible exception of an extreme rollover week, your expected winnings will *never* be equal to your costs.

 

[Doonhamer]

I vaguely recall seeing it was around 10,000 people every week would choose those numbers so if you choose them you really will be sharing the jackpot.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Back in the late 90s, I remember seeing 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 come up and the 6th number was disjunct. Normally, a 5-number lottery breakdown prize is worth £1000. A few people in my old village chose 1-3-5-7-9-11. They of course walked away with much less than £1000, with a lot of people having the same idea.

 

[Abraham]

Unless someone else wins as well, and you have to split it, so you will make a loss if you get less then 14 mill

it's an interesting one, because while boosting the pot by 14 mill less the charity component (50% isnt it?) you'll win at every single level in every possible combination.

1 - 6 numbers Jackpot (if you're lucky you'll take the whole pot, which for last weeks you've just doubled) 14 mil
6 - 5 numbers +bonus (doubles the number who won 5+b last weekend, but still 100k for each one) 600k
294 - 5 numbers (again very roughly doubles, but 1k for each one) 300k
.
.
etc

not sure how significant the number of 4's and 3's would be, I imagine the 3's would be quite a lot because they're guaranteed 10. Whereas 4 can go as low as £12 as I found out earlier this year you'd still get a lot of them though.

The jackpot size and whether you split it is still the biggest decider in whether you'd break even though.

 

[Strife212]

buy a lottery ticket. mention odds of 14million. person at lottery machine gives you 14million lottery tickets. WIN

 

[unwashed potato!]

I thought there was a result fairly recently that was similar to if not exactly 1,2,3,4,5,6?

thunderball was something like 22 24 25 26 28 29 just a couple weeks ago.

 

[Vonhelmet]

With the possible exception of an extreme rollover week, your expected winnings will *never* be equal to your costs.

I do appreciate that the weak link in my logic is my knowledge of how they allot prices for 5 balls and 5 plus bonus ball.

The bulk of the winnings comes from gettings loads of 3 and 4 ball combos and for £10 and £65 (?) each.

 

[Strife212]

The actual act of buying 14 million tickets will increase the jackpot as well.

 

[Pate]

If you won the final euromillions rollover, surely you would break even?

 

[Zogger]

euromillions odds are much worse at 1 in 76,275,360 so even more of a layout and a bigger potential loss if you share

 

[Stewy]

I thought it was a lot less than 1 in 14 million to win the jackpot?

 

[denby]

If I ever have a ridiculous amount of money to waste (hundreds of millions) I will place 14 million lines to include every combination, just to say I won the lottery. Hell if it's a rollover I may even make some profit!

you would make a profit because you would get all your money back minus £1

plus all the other people that didnt win..

if you win outright of course

 

[Narj]

Pretty simple php script

Shuffle the numbers 1 - 49, take the last 6. Sort. Loop it and check against your numbers sorted. Take an average out of 100 correct numbers. Probably overall it'll run the script ~ 1,400,000,000 times.

I used to use a simple one-liner to do my lottery numbers

CNT=1; while  [ "$CNT" -le "49" ]; do echo $RANDOM ; CNT=`expr $CNT + 1`; done | nl | sort -n +1 | head -6 | awk '{print $1}' | sort -n | fmt

 

[Abraham]

you would make a profit because you would get all your money back minus £1

plus all the other people that didnt win..

if you win outright of course

Apart from the lottery isn't a straight pot, halfish of the money goes to charitable causes.

 

[DaveF]

I do appreciate that the weak link in my logic is my knowledge of how they allot prices for 5 balls and 5 plus bonus ball.

The bulk of the winnings comes from gettings loads of 3 and 4 ball combos and for £10 and £65 (?) each.

Well, you know they allocate things so that they keep some of the money(*). So, for every bet you make, you expect to get less back than you put in. In mathematical terms, each bet has negative expectation.

Since the sum of lots of negative things is still negative, any combination of bets will still have negative expectation.

(*) In the case of a rollover, this may not be true - they may actually pay out more than they take in. (I think in practice you'll need at least a triple rollover before this is the case though).

 

[mlbtheshow]

Say the jackpot was like 30m one week (Normal UK Lottery).... and your only outlay is like 14m... wouldnt a bank take a punt at lending someone the money?

I know its not a guaranteed return for the lender if more than 1 winnner comes up.... but if not you could easily pay back the 14m plus whatever interest there was.

Probably not I suppose.

 

[mame]

This was on a tv programme years ago. They said those numbers have the same odds as any others but added that so many thousand people a week use them so if they did get drawn, the winnings would be low

 

[Raymond Lin]

I once worked out (I was a lonely teenager with a lot of time on my hands) that if you bought about 8.4m tickets, your expected winnings would be equal to your costs.

I think that's about the number I came up with anyway.

I did that once too, but it will also totally depend on that week's expected jackpot, whether it is a roll over or not. If yiu presume the number of winning ticket from 3 numbers (£10), 4 numbers and 5 number etc are the same, the biggest difference is the jackpot. So doing this ln a Wednesday lottery would be a stupid idea. Doing it on a roll over makes a lot more sense.

The downside also is that because the lottery jackpot is also dependant on number of tickets sold, which means more chances of winning tickets held by others, so a roll over also means a bigger possibility of a split winnings.

All in all, roll over is still the best time to buy.

 

[Strife212]

Say the jackpot was like 30m one week (Normal UK Lottery).... and your only outlay is like 14m... wouldnt a bank take a punt at lending someone the money?

I know its not a guaranteed return for the lender if more than 1 winnner comes up.... but if not you could easily pay back the 14m plus whatever interest there was.

Probably not I suppose.

The issue is, how would you actually do it? Nowhere is going to sell you 14 million tickets. Filling them in would take too long as well.

14 million seconds = 0.443642705 years

Some kind of automated system which bought the tickets and sent the numbers off would be required, and I'm certain you would be barred from recieving the prize.