Soldato
- Joined
- 6 Jun 2011
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Winning ticket purchased in Warrington.
Not me then
Winning ticket purchased in Warrington.
Winning ticket purchased in Warrington.
1 number and 1 bonus, the usual when i match anything.
I won the £93m.
Very quite what?
The odds of winning the jackpot fall from one in 14 million to one in 45 million.
The odds of winning £25 for matching three numbers fall from 57 to one to 97 to one
The odds of winning about £100 for four numbers fall from about 1,000 to about 2,200 to one
Five balls will still win you about £1,000 but the odds have dropped from 55,000 to one to 144,000 to one
And five balls plus the bonus ball goes from 2.3 million to one to 7.5 million to one with no change to the estimated £50,000 you would win.
I won the £93m.
The odds of winning the jackpot fall from one in 14 million to one in 45 million.
The odds of winning £25 for matching three numbers fall from 57 to one to 97 to one
The odds of winning about £100 for four numbers fall from about 1,000 to about 2,200 to one
Five balls will still win you about £1,000 but the odds have dropped from 55,000 to one to 144,000 to one
And five balls plus the bonus ball goes from 2.3 million to one to 7.5 million to one with no change to the estimated £50,000 you would win.
For us number nerds, the new rules are a gift because the probabilities have become more interesting. As well as increasing the number of balls, Camelot have also changed how the game works in two fundamental ways. First, while there are still the same smaller prizes for matching five, four and three balls, they have also added a new prize if you match exactly two. You win another lottery ticket. Which does not feel like a great prize. Is being allowed to try and win the same prizes again next time count as a prize in its own right?
Mathematically, it means that the probabilities are not quite as clear-cut. I calculated that the odds of matching only two numbers in a draw is one in 10.258, which means you have a 9.748% chance of playing again. This second chance comes in the form of a lucky dip ticket: six numbers picked at random.
I spoke to the press office at Camelot and confirmed that it is possible to then match two numbers on your lucky dip and win a third ticket, and so on. Technically, you could buy one ticket and keep winning free tickets for the rest of your life. But that is exceedingly unlikely, even by lottery standards.
This means the new odds of winning the jackpot of “one in 45,057,474” is actually incorrect. Because there is a 9.748% chance you’ll get a second go; a 0.9503% chance you’ll get three goes; 0.09264% four goes; 0.009031% five and so on. We can mathematically roll up all these vanishingly small probabilities and calculate the new odds of winning the jackpot on a single initial ticket purchased: one in 40,665,099. Only 2.9 times worse than before.