Can I place bets instead of buying a lottery ticket?

[garnett]

I know nothing about betting but every now and then I might buy a lottery ticket, and it's always rankled because the odds are so bad.

I was thinking that you could "build your own" lottery ticket by placing a £1/2 bet on a single very unlikely outcome or (more traditionally) an accumulator, with a payout similar to a lottery win, but it's a faff, and (I believe that) betting companies have caps on what they will pay out, so there'd be no point accumulating odds above a certain threshold.

Ideally I'd just bet on the outcome (or a partial outcome - say the first 5 numbers drawn) of the regular lottery, but I think betting on the outcome of the UK lottery, while resident in the UK is not allowed.

Does anyone know whether any betting app offers something like this already?

 

[garnett]

Correctly guess the number in European roulette 4 times with £1.

You would need a site which has a 43k or more max.

You need the discipline to bet 43k on a single number after guessing 3 times…

Yes - that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of in principle. My maths around betting is sketchy, but looking at the Euromillions, a £2.50 ticket gets you the chance of 1 in 140 million to win a prize of say £65 million.

Placing a £2.50 bet on guessing the correct roulette number 5 times in a row, is a 1 in 60 million chance, and the prize would be £131 million.

So better than twice as good odds for a prize twice the size...

The bet looks over 4 times the "value".

Here you go:

Lottery online • Lotto Betting • Lottoland UK

Like Lotto? Then you'll love Lottoland! Bet on international lotteries to find better odds and bigger jackpots!

www.lottoland.co.uk

A few other sites do it. You just pick the numbers and bet that they'll be chosen.

Thanks - that's an interesting website - but the stake cost, odds and prize money look identical to the existing lotteries - so no more attractive - unless I'm missing something?

just bet on stocks you rarely ever lose your initial stake and it's not a total waste of money.

It's like gambling and saving at the same time..

How much money have people wasted on lottery tickets over the last 10 years? must be a few thousand for the people playing every week/multiple times a week

I reckon I buy 10 tickets a year. It's pure escapism.

 

[garnett]

The lottery is more like giving money to charity and you might win a prize, rather than gambling tbh.

Hilarious. I wondered if anyone would try and virtue-signal about how, for them, it was all about the charity.

 

[garnett]

You're better off sticking to that and stop wasting your time. The odds of winning on lotteries are ridiculously small, and you're better off doing something else with the money. You are highly highly unlikely to manage to "beat the system", you are thinking about the wrong things to actually make any money.

You've missed pretty much every point.