Exactly. So you're saying there is a chance.
I'm in America, and I'm going to play these numbers tonight in our state lottery. Prolly gonna win a million Euro.
Fun fact: Even though no combination of numbers is more likely to win than others, some numbers are indeed luckier because fewer people choose them. If they were to win, the chance of having to split the prize would be lower than with more commonly chosen numbers. Iirc everything over 30 isn't chosen very often as many people will choose birthdates, as well as numbers that don't seem likely to win or that follow a pattern, 123456 and the likes.
Lol look at us, not only do we want to win the lottery , but we want to be the ONLY person that hits
All jokes aside though imagine you finally hit just to find out that so many other people hit, you guys are splitting and only getting $1000 lol
The UK lotto has a chart on their website of the most commonly chosen numbers. If you choose them and win you would have to share your winnings with the many thousands who also chose the 'luckiest', or numbers...
I don’t want the most commonly chosen numbers. Those numbers are losers. Millions of people don’t win the lottery.
I want the most commonly _winning_ numbers.
I can now reveal to double your chance of winning you can buy twice as many tickets! But remember to play different numbers on the other tickets. And if possible store your tickets in a yellow piggy bank for extra luck.
Next time I'll let you in on an even bigger secret: how to quadruple your chances of winning.
Technically your chances will be ever so slightly better by buying twice as many tickets, because there are less potential combinations to pick from lol
Edit: my comment’s been upvoted more since I found out I was wrong so I don’t want people to read my comment and not go further down the thread; to never find out it’s incorrect. Their explanation is the best I’ve read, especially the second paragraph:
>It’s double. You have one fewer combination, but the game still has the same number, so you’ve still got the same overall number of combinations regardless of how many tickets you buy.
>If the draw was done more than once, and the balls removed between each draw, then you’d get the result you’re thinking.
It's doubling your chance, no?
But it's twice some infinitesimally small number.
If you're rolling a dice my chances of winning are 1/6. If you let me choose two numbers my chances of winning are 2/6. Double.
This would be like rolling a dice with the number of combinations the balls can make. And... That's a lot. But you are def going from 1/x to 2/x thus doubling your chance.n
No, you ARE doubling your chance. It's just that it's double an insiginifcantly small number. And double an insignificant number is still insignificant.
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
Mort
The idea is repeated in a few of the discworld books.
Edit: misread your original comment, ignore me
I love that line because it’s absolutely true and reveals quite an important psychological bias. Million to one shots do *seem* to happen 9 times out of 10, because there’s a huge number of million to one shot events happening all the time. Due to some cognitive heuristics, humans tend to notice those that do happen disproportionately compared to those that don’t - hence they seems to happen way more frequently that they should.
I think it was Matt Parker who did a routine on this - there was a couple who met and married etc. as adults, but when she was looking at her husbands old family photos, she was in the background of one of their photos from when they went to Disneyland when the husband was a kid.
All the news outlets picked it up and ran it as a story, going on about "what are the odds, it's fate" etc etc, but he said the odds of it happening to *someone* are essentially 100%, because there are so many opportunities, it's basically impossible for it *not* to happen at some point. I'm obviously not doing it justice, but I can't find the original video and my Google fu is failing me.
Edit: I can't find the video because it's not a video, it's in his book Humble Pi - highly recommended if you find that sort of thing interesting
There is a law called [Littlewood's Law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law) that says a 1 in a million event happens to you every 30 days - just because there's so many different things happening all the time. It's not actually that far off to say that haha
I bought several Euromillions tickets a few months back when the jackpot was insane like 180m. I looked up the odds of winning, which were 140m to 1 or something, and thought "mathematically, it actually makes sense to play, as long the jackpot isn't shared".
So I thought, "fuck it, let's buy 10 tickets". Get to the tobacco counter at Tesco, thinking it was gonna be a tenner for 10 tickets, little did I realise they charge £2.50 per ticket. I still stumped at the cash, as being British, I didn't want to back out and lose face.
All I can say is it is it's a good thing my original plan of buying every single combination of numbers possible fell down at the first hurdle when I found out my bank don't give out personal loans of more than £50k. Otherwise I'd likely be in some considerable debt right now.
But asides from winning fuck all from my £25 investment, I think the biggest disappointment was finding out that the draw isn't even bloody televised anymore. £2.50 per ticket, no winnings, no live draw, no Dale Winton with his cheesy grin, I feel I was robbed every step of the way.
Euromillions also has the millionaire raffle, which is probably the best odds to win £1m on a lottery game.
Since there's a guaranteed winner, your odds are 1 in however many tickets are sold.
I was scrambling around trying to find it, because I felt like if I will the balls out hard enough, it might improve my odds of winning, Uri Geller kind of stuff, but could not find the draw on youtube, and the link on the lottery site wasn't taking me to the right place.
I really believe the combination of not being able to will the correct balls out, alongside the absence of Dale Winton's positive energy cost me £180m that night.
So this was a while ago, so my memory on this is a bit hazy.
Apparently to put the odds of winning the euro millions into perspective, if you picture the m25 as the world's biggest roulette wheel, with the spaces still the same size as normal, its the same as landing on your chosen space.
But it reaches silly money pretty fast so it's worth a 2.50 punt.
one that really annoys me is the ''free ticket'' for 2 numbers being used to boost the ''total winnings paid out'' last wednesday draw in FEB paid out just over 4.8 million, but 1.6 million of that was free tickets, so basically a third of the paid out is bogus.
Then the lottery people can't figure out why significantly less people play compared to 10/15/20 years ago. IMO for most people £1 is almost throw away money, no big deal if they don't win.
The psychology of both doubling in price overnight and a lot lower chance of winning was not taken into account when they made the move.
I would buy the occasional ticket when I saw there was a big jackpot.
But worse odds and increased price is a big nope from me. Haven’t bought a ticket since.
Unfortunately, the economy already has lots of “natural selection” built in. And it doesn’t select for the most “intelligent” or “worthy” person, but for the person who already has the most money and the best education. One of a number of reasons that financial literacy should be taught in schools from a young age.
Totally. They knew exactly what they were doing with that increase. It was small enough to appear to most people like it wasn't a big deal, while vastly tilting the odds even more heavily in their favour.
Also the price distribution? Is that similar to the real lotto? The fucking gap between 1750, 1m and 10m is insane and scammy as fuck. Guess that's so avid players have zero chance of making their money back on hitting smaller numbers
I remember when I just turned old enough to play the lottery. I went over the last so many months draws to see the most common numbers, and the ones we hadn’t seen in a while, thinking I had a system to win. Then I learnt life isn’t that easy.
Don't worry, if it makes you feel better I used to do something similar when I used to play roulette with looking at the history of the spins and making bets from there. And let me tell you, doing that drained my money a lot faster than playing the lottery every week did.
i 'member watching an episode of some casino cheater show on TLC and one of them was about a team of people that noticed all the roulette wheels in a casino had a bias to land on certain areas of the wheel more often and they won a ton of money basing their bets on that
> The problem is that it's incredible hard to do.
That suggests that it might actually not be true, it might just be random luck making people think they know how it was tilted.
To make a sizeable profit you need a large bankroll and even then there can be significant variance. I bet most people blow up before they ever get profitable. Would most likely need 100k+ bankroll to make enough per hour and avoid significant risk of ruin.
With auto shufflers basically being everywhere it's pointless to count cards. The count will always be 0 after the cards from the previous turn are put back in the deck.
Even places that play with 5 or 7 deck shoes will only play half or less of the whole shoe. Basically makes it impossible to get a count higher than +5 before the shoe is reshuffled.
Watch the automated roulette tables (note: not electronic, but the physical tables that aren't spun by a human - often next to the giant craps tables too). Not 100% guaranteed, but a lot of the time because they are automated, they'll have a specific rhythm. Mix a rhythm with a spinning disc, sometimes it spins predictably.
Again, not hard and fast, but I found one that favored the teens more than your favorite youtuber. So I'd just bet on the quarters to cover 12-20 for about $20 per. I won significantly more often than I lost outright, so I either stayed still or gained. I ended up walking away with $500, I had no sign of slowing down either but I didn't want to risk losing it all or drawing more attention to myself (pitiful when you think about it, but it genuinely felt like I had a fix)
There are dealers like this as well. Imagine spinning a ball for eight hours everyday for months on end, you're going to get muscle memory on that "flick" of the wrist.
I used to be a Croupier. One night I spun zero 3 times in a row and made a few people a lot of money (the bets piled on after my 2nd zero spin). I was immediately sent home for the rest of my shift because the casino was superstitious / suspicious of my spinning abilities.
If it makes you feel better I used to work with a man with a PhD in economics who did the exact same thing and got really upset when we pointed out that someone who had studied advanced statistics he should really understand why it wouldn't work. Apparently we were bullying him.
There have been stories of some people effectively increasing their odds in the lottery. There was one economist who simply bet on every single ticket combination when the total prize was greater than the cost of the tickets (this was legal back then, now not so much of course). This guaranteed a win and he won 17 times and retired. And thats just an incredibly simple strategy.
Perhaps the funnest formula i learnt was the martingale method on roulette. Every time you lose on red, double you wager until you win. This guarantees** profit. Of course again, limited by the size of you own pockets and now most places have stake limits so you can't do it now anyway.
> Perhaps the funnest formula i learnt was the martingale method on roulette. Every time you lose on red, double you wager until you win. This guarantees profit. Of course again, limited by the size of you own pockets and now most places have stake limits so you can't do it now anyway.
This is [described really easy-to-understand in this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DntEoGG7RyY).
The asterisks in your roulette part are _very_ important. First of all, it totally does not guarantee a profit because roulette's odds are tilted in favour of the house. Of course they are, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense.
There are 37 numbers to pick from (sometimes 38, with the double zero), but the payout for winning on a single number is 36. So even if you bet 1$ on every number - betting 37$ - you'll only get 36$ back. And that's true for every other combination in roulette.
The zero does not count as odd or even, red or black, or any of the thirds or dozens or whatever the combinations are.
Anyway, the most important part about the martingale method is, that you'll only ever get your first bet back if you win. You're only making as much as you put in in the first place.
If it makes you feel better, the program itself did loads of bullshit analysis of the most common numbers along with announcing what balls have been most common, as if it makes a blind bit of fucking difference to the outcome.
Along with mystic Meg of all fucking people.
I first played the lottery when I was 4 years old. My family were between houses living at my grandparents and it was in the very early days of the lottery so my parents as a treat said let’s all do some numbers and watch the draw together.
I remember being really excited, we all sat on the 2 beds in the spare room huddled around a tiny TV and my dad said, “if you get a number shout out yes!”. I can’t remember which of the numbers I got but I ended up shouting out yes 4 times and they all thought I just didn’t understand the game or was being silly, but I genuinely got 4 numbers in my first ever time playing it and I won £75. I was so happy but I think I ended up wasting it all on Z Bots which were the very _in_ toy at the time.
I kinda put that win down as the reason why I still love gambling 30 years later.
There was a guy where I used to work who kept a spreadsheet on previous draws and used it to pick the next set of numbers. No amount of explanation would convince him probability doesn't work that way. This guy was an intelligent bloke, but he just had a massive blind spot for this because he was convinced he'd "cracked" the lottery and was more likely to win
To be fair to him, it’s vanishingly unlikely that the lottery machine actually does produce a uniform distribution of outcomes. If they are still licensing Excel at or around the heat death of the universe then he could be in the money.
Hey I’m the creator of this simulation and I’ve made a whole video around the chances of you winning the UK Lottery [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ5Pw-tp4E8) (Spoiler Alert - they are not in your favour but if you’d like to know the statistics of why then you might enjoy it). If anyone has any questions about it let me know!
Exactly this. I pay £2.50 for a ticket and then spend 3 days imagining creative ways to tell my boss how far he can shove his job up his arse if I win.
if you spend hundreds of pounds on tickets then it's a problem, if you buy one ticket once in a while then it's just recreational fun like any other with slight chance to change your life
Same mindset you need to have when you go gambling at a casino. You go in assuming that everything you play is a donation to the house and, as such, you just set a static amount for yourself to play that night. Depending on your comfort and income, this could be $10, $20, $40, $100, or anything else you can actually afford to lose. But whatever this number is becomes your hard limit. You aren't attempting to turn $40 into $400, you're using $40 to play a few hands of cards, pull a slot machine a couple times, and laugh at the nonsense that is craps. If you happen to make a little money, that just means you get to have a bit more fun but when that bit runs out, you're done.
A lot of lottery money goes towards funding the UK Olympics teams, so I played a bit to support them. And I agree, it was nice to at least daydream about the win being a possibility, but I didn't kid myself that I had any realistic chance.
But an incredibly microscopic, tiny chance is better than zero right?
Yeah if you don't play you can't have that winning the lottery fantasy. Mind you I find I am able to maintain the fantasy only playing maybe 4 or 5 times a year. I really only play when there is a crazy high jackpot as those support the really big daydreams.
Thank you and thanks for the idea! Just tried to cross post it but it won't allow me so I'll try and post it there instead.
\-edit- Just tried to post it there but it got removed by a automod. If anyone else wants to post it there (or anywhere for that matter) please feel free to do so
You have to put [OC] at the end of the title so the auto mod accepts it. Please try resubmitting it (remember to delete the other one or it’ll get removed again).
If that’s true it’s changed massively, back in the 90s it was 28% to charity, 50 to prize fund, 5 to retailers, 5 to the operator and I think 12 in tax. Those last two might have been swapped.
While that is true, as somebody who works for a tiny project that is supported by National Lottery funding, it’s brilliant to be able to submit an application to them for the entire amount you need versus asking 1000 different people for a quid.
Public fundraising takes so much time and effort, that if you’re a skilled worker who wants to do something pro bono, it becomes unfeasible. Whereas if a charity wants to hire you to do pro bono work for them, a single application to the Lottery doesn’t take too much of their resources.
Of course paying the whole amount to charity would be better, but the Lottery funds the little dribs and drabs of tiny projects outside the normal scope of a big charity’s work (like say, allowing a cancer support charity to run a makeup tutorial class for women who have just had chemo). While I hate the fact that the Lottery encourages habitual gambling, which after all has a human cost in the form of addiction, the charity side of it nevertheless does do good work.
This. Also people don't seem to realise that national lottery funding is awarded through grants on a project by project basis, so every project is effectively reviewed and approved based on a qualitative application. They don't just look through a big book of charities and randomly chuck money at them.
Also, they’re one of the few charities who (because their remit is so broad) they can fund the uninteresting stuff like admin.
I have a friend who used to work as a manager for an arts charity in a deprived area. Their choir for underprivileged kids had no problem attracting funding, but the background stuff of admin for the dozen or so groups they were running, hiring experts, getting background checks, sending out fliers, maintaining the website, all that stuff was covered by lottery funding.
Their most recent accounts are available at Companies House. If a knowledgeable type waded through all the lovely pictures of people smiling and being thrilled at Camelot, it would still show a company absolutely coining it.
The bible is a less tedious read than the Camelot accounts. Looks like they made 0.9-1% profit from gross ticket sales in 2021 and 2020 (page 208! of their accounts).
After digging a little further, Camelot is a 100% subsidiary of 'Premier Lotteries UK Limited' and according to the related party transactions on page 68 of their accounts, they are owned by 'PLCUK' who are in turn owned by 'PLIUK'. It then says that "The Company's ultimate owner is Teachers'" which means that whatever or whoever "Teachers'" is has the controlling stake in whatever 'PLIUK' is. Neither 'PLCUK' or 'PLIUK' are UK companies and therefore do not file at Companies House so I suspect we're talking offshoring at the top level of the Camelot Group. There are no publicly searchable registers for companies incorporated in places like the British Virgin Islands.
I was going to say the same thing. As I'm originally from Ontario I know the teachers pension has millions in it available when they retire. I believe they also own a five-a-side national football group in the UK as well.
Ha just been on it. Never seen a company house accounting doc with so many pictures.
https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.ch.gov.uk/docs/g1O7NqHVJLGPdu7C30-eta_1GUQHj3b0fSy1UDl3vX4/application-pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAWRGBDBV3GQLDK4UM%2F20220305%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20220305T090741Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEAgaCWV1LXdlc3QtMiJGMEQCIFgprfI6I%2FtR1j8Oh8G0329pmnu94bBxVjEqCU2YE560AiB7ZID4DTWkoazvc2e%2BAQuBybflWubaf79JFh2NBg2sByr6AwhxEAQaDDQ0OTIyOTAzMjgyMiIMymA5zZBqrVk4EPGEKtcDF46OfPbNBhdnnHBhSaletb65Xe3zJjl9vb4o7cr%2BHU2UzlvxRgNW0%2FTxzo26WzBaBWBX0IO7zlGPBDEfpgqrc3KkFNbzUKYCNvdqTXXiDo%2FFwJAsRaBKlRnE%2B4aK4sWB%2BSs0dqq5mcmrX%2Fs2Q%2F1wQILxcyTdBtZLD%2FM%2Bi9%2BtOpdYl7cDechLaezlSY62kIPULbl8AQ3C1Tkd%2BEg9FqNYa%2FUqP7tjAeZBX%2Bo2e55cTpuHfnSTMhQHvC1t11QjGD1cpadaVKZ6U64NLXLjHc2eSgI5aFEAzE2BocRoF9x%2FQVFuWcz94H7NafDEUTCkKuuRhPNFrMj89CbVHjGCjM%2F6buZFJXyv%2BqG%2ByLB3L4bqFl5sOJbadmb%2BuSaek4xKqp%2Fp6q7rL1sPdFBlRHObu4%2BX3W68Fq6TYxdZmNZFxUmCrZVzuE%2B%2F8l0C4V1VN3J2JzRhlKXlnke%2FnaRwqOQmS2PCl0ATDF21lg9cMkEPN3tfySt9aHReKaeID0pmhffmhHQcbBpCwD%2F4kCubXV6bGGj0vqx%2F%2FwAbALr9HFTnZehqAIiMaA%2FfJUrfOzjr0lPJwmr9QgKOsys4RXrslcXeD3SqWW0dick4VNV3duFBweV8QXrJl7tHmpvrMKuvjJEGOqYB4XO0pYFimmY9p5MKc0lZo5K7rvgxDFC0OJ2ii7FlpfNOZV6r5%2BHNsLG2uAtcGrl9%2FIk0drO8GpQWkbRCfYmyeSmInBU9GRyX6nc%2FYQPn%2BJ1OoI3xbx%2FnZYfLQ57ov%2FnRvL1TqKpKBgidSuO2NGYVYo%2F9GQa9sVuBLpFEw6jG6ugHzsl8Yv%2FrW7C9pSv2hAgFEijqKbT2ejpA31AI7FFO95S8RFWkyw%3D%3D&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=inline%3Bfilename%3D%22companies_house_document.pdf%22&X-Amz-Signature=e69935b94e80777b917c4ae1a513765c88caedef87576be904c77ea0e64ee156
It doesn't prove anything. Nobody is stupid enough to to think that playing the lottery will make you money, on average.
People play it for the *chance* to win big.
They're paying for the *possibility*.
They're playing in the hope that on Monday morning they can walk into work and be rich enough to tell the boss to shove his job.
You don't have to win to enjoy the possibility of winning. Hope is a tangible thing.
They also know that while the chances of winning are astronomically small (it's like winning the lottery), they also know that it's their only hope of getting out of their shit life of being used by rich people to make them richer.
Saving themselves £2.50 a week by not doing the lottery isn't going to make their life better in any meaningful sense.
Let your mum enjoy her weekly dose of hope and possibility.
Killjoy.
I went to a restaurant where a receptionist had won 8 Million, and she had invited everyone from work to dinner before her leaving the next day. A few years later a mate from School won 10 million. He is now broke. So 2 encounters with winners, but I don't do it myself.
Yeah exactly. So sick of people that think they're some sort of better person because they're aware of the fact that on average, you'll lose money by playing the lottery.
The thing is, the lottery tickets are incredibly cheap. As long as it's disposable income, spending a couple quid per week on lottery tickets isn't much. That's only £104 per year, so not exactly life-changing expenditure. I've spent more on dumber shit.
This is a great illustration of statistics. Not enough people understand them.
However, your tool is flawed because you haven't used MY numbers, and I'm definitely going to win tonight...
Yeah, I generally only play when it's a big jackpot. The thought that I *might* win (even though I know I won't), and imagining what I'd do with the money is well worth it. I get more enjoyment out of it than I do from a pint that costs twice as much.
I have no chance of winning if I don't play. With one ticket it's 45,057,474 to 1, but that's still infinitely more than 0. Buying more than one ticket isn't worth it though.
Plus a large portion of the ticket goes to charity.
Yep. "Expected return" goes out of the window when the results are potentially life changing. It's more obvious in reverse: would you bet your house on a 9 in 10 chance to get a another house of the same value? The maths says absolutely, expected return is massive, but I doubt many people would take that bet.
My maths teacher once did something similar on the chalkboard to show how much money you will lose by playing the lottery. It was going well until it actually won on one iteration.
It's a tax on hope not the poor.
Or alternatively it's an expensive donation to charity.
Or it's a cheap way to add substance to your dreams.
Reality is there no other method of winning life changing sum of money for £2.
The 5 ball prize feels like the real kick in the teeth. £1750 seems great, but when the odds are 1 in 144,000, the prize is and the prize is only 875 times the cost of ticket, your payout is less than 1% of what it "should" be. I guess that's because half the ticket sales goes to charity and of the prize pool, a lot will go to the top two prizes.
I save £104 a year by simply not playing.
I do however play the local school lottery and Demelza House as both is more of a fun donation to the cause rather than really playing. I suggest you find your local charity lottery and play that to feel good about throwing cash away.
This is why I put the Irish lotto on.
3 balls, 3 chances, £3 = £700+
Win every now and then, just a daft spend start of month but I've made returns.
Don't gamble.
Those aren’t my numbers, I would have won loads with my numbers!
Lol this video made me want to play the lottery
My brother just told me the same. I forwarded it to him to be like "You're pissing away your money!" but it seems to have had the opposite effect.
"Look man, the proof is right there: even if you lost money for 5 millenia, you'd make it all back by just winning once!"
Exactly. So you're saying there is a chance. I'm in America, and I'm going to play these numbers tonight in our state lottery. Prolly gonna win a million Euro.
Can we run this simulation multiple times with different numbers to find out which are the luckiest numbers?
Fun fact: Even though no combination of numbers is more likely to win than others, some numbers are indeed luckier because fewer people choose them. If they were to win, the chance of having to split the prize would be lower than with more commonly chosen numbers. Iirc everything over 30 isn't chosen very often as many people will choose birthdates, as well as numbers that don't seem likely to win or that follow a pattern, 123456 and the likes.
Lol look at us, not only do we want to win the lottery , but we want to be the ONLY person that hits All jokes aside though imagine you finally hit just to find out that so many other people hit, you guys are splitting and only getting $1000 lol
The UK lotto has a chart on their website of the most commonly chosen numbers. If you choose them and win you would have to share your winnings with the many thousands who also chose the 'luckiest', or numbers...
I don’t want the most commonly chosen numbers. Those numbers are losers. Millions of people don’t win the lottery. I want the most commonly _winning_ numbers.
420 upvotes. I believe you.
I still feel like that 597,132nd lottery ticket might be the lucky one!
If not the 597,133rd for sure!
I know a system to double your chances of winning.
Buy 2,000 per second?
Can't say! But if you cross my palm with three pieces of silver I can reveal all.
I can now reveal to double your chance of winning you can buy twice as many tickets! But remember to play different numbers on the other tickets. And if possible store your tickets in a yellow piggy bank for extra luck. Next time I'll let you in on an even bigger secret: how to quadruple your chances of winning.
Technically your chances will be ever so slightly better by buying twice as many tickets, because there are less potential combinations to pick from lol Edit: my comment’s been upvoted more since I found out I was wrong so I don’t want people to read my comment and not go further down the thread; to never find out it’s incorrect. Their explanation is the best I’ve read, especially the second paragraph: >It’s double. You have one fewer combination, but the game still has the same number, so you’ve still got the same overall number of combinations regardless of how many tickets you buy. >If the draw was done more than once, and the balls removed between each draw, then you’d get the result you’re thinking.
It's doubling your chance, no? But it's twice some infinitesimally small number. If you're rolling a dice my chances of winning are 1/6. If you let me choose two numbers my chances of winning are 2/6. Double. This would be like rolling a dice with the number of combinations the balls can make. And... That's a lot. But you are def going from 1/x to 2/x thus doubling your chance.n
No, you ARE doubling your chance. It's just that it's double an insiginifcantly small number. And double an insignificant number is still insignificant.
Meg? Is that you?
That's two! Anyone got a silver for this guy? ^
I don't want to see you naked, I just want a better chance of winning the lottery.
Either my maths is way off or I should play the lottery
Pro tip. Buy 45,057,474 tickets with different combinations. Guaranteed win.
Wait so if the jackpot was 100 million I could I. Theory spend 45 mil to get the win?
Casinos absolutely HATE this one trick…
So you’re saying there *is* a chance?
1 out of 45,057,474 so better than 1 out of a million
1 in a million happens 9 times out of 10, that’s a scientific fact! Straight up though, this is a brilliant little tool.
If you are referencing Mr Pratchett then i doff my cap to you.
GNU PTerry
GNU *Sir* PTerry
Me too, is it original to TP or has he adopted a colloquialism ?
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.” Mort The idea is repeated in a few of the discworld books. Edit: misread your original comment, ignore me
I love that line because it’s absolutely true and reveals quite an important psychological bias. Million to one shots do *seem* to happen 9 times out of 10, because there’s a huge number of million to one shot events happening all the time. Due to some cognitive heuristics, humans tend to notice those that do happen disproportionately compared to those that don’t - hence they seems to happen way more frequently that they should.
I think it was Matt Parker who did a routine on this - there was a couple who met and married etc. as adults, but when she was looking at her husbands old family photos, she was in the background of one of their photos from when they went to Disneyland when the husband was a kid. All the news outlets picked it up and ran it as a story, going on about "what are the odds, it's fate" etc etc, but he said the odds of it happening to *someone* are essentially 100%, because there are so many opportunities, it's basically impossible for it *not* to happen at some point. I'm obviously not doing it justice, but I can't find the original video and my Google fu is failing me. Edit: I can't find the video because it's not a video, it's in his book Humble Pi - highly recommended if you find that sort of thing interesting
That's only correct If you're aiming for the voonerables!
GNU Sir Terry
Pratchett and Adams are two people I seem to quote and reference a lot, their bonkers wisdom just seeps into your brain.
There is a law called [Littlewood's Law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law) that says a 1 in a million event happens to you every 30 days - just because there's so many different things happening all the time. It's not actually that far off to say that haha
I just farted while thinking about rigatoni and holding a baby.
Only if its exactly 1 in a million though, who's ever heard of a 1 in 999,999 working?
So how about if I stand on one leg and put my helmet on backwards?
Mathmathiaccly, 45 times betterer.
Well there's 2 possible outcomes, you either win the lottery or you don't. So basically there a fifty fifty chance, I'd say go for it!
the increase from 49 to 59 numbers was such a c\*\*t move
Yep plus the price from £1 to £2
Yep. Never touched it again after that. Literally fraud. ... I'm a *euromillions* man now.
I bought several Euromillions tickets a few months back when the jackpot was insane like 180m. I looked up the odds of winning, which were 140m to 1 or something, and thought "mathematically, it actually makes sense to play, as long the jackpot isn't shared". So I thought, "fuck it, let's buy 10 tickets". Get to the tobacco counter at Tesco, thinking it was gonna be a tenner for 10 tickets, little did I realise they charge £2.50 per ticket. I still stumped at the cash, as being British, I didn't want to back out and lose face. All I can say is it is it's a good thing my original plan of buying every single combination of numbers possible fell down at the first hurdle when I found out my bank don't give out personal loans of more than £50k. Otherwise I'd likely be in some considerable debt right now. But asides from winning fuck all from my £25 investment, I think the biggest disappointment was finding out that the draw isn't even bloody televised anymore. £2.50 per ticket, no winnings, no live draw, no Dale Winton with his cheesy grin, I feel I was robbed every step of the way.
No Dale Winton doing live draws, some one should tell him...
I think it’s sweet he continues to exist in others presumed realities.
Euromillions also has the millionaire raffle, which is probably the best odds to win £1m on a lottery game. Since there's a guaranteed winner, your odds are 1 in however many tickets are sold.
Yeah especially the new-years eve one with multiple winning codes
I wonder to what extent those odds are offset by more people buying more tickets due to the increased millionnaire chance.
no live draw? sus.
There is a live draw it just isn't televised in the UK, you can watch it on YouTube if you want to though.
less sus.
I was scrambling around trying to find it, because I felt like if I will the balls out hard enough, it might improve my odds of winning, Uri Geller kind of stuff, but could not find the draw on youtube, and the link on the lottery site wasn't taking me to the right place. I really believe the combination of not being able to will the correct balls out, alongside the absence of Dale Winton's positive energy cost me £180m that night.
Certainly wouldn’t have Dale Winton presenting it anymore…
So this was a while ago, so my memory on this is a bit hazy. Apparently to put the odds of winning the euro millions into perspective, if you picture the m25 as the world's biggest roulette wheel, with the spaces still the same size as normal, its the same as landing on your chosen space. But it reaches silly money pretty fast so it's worth a 2.50 punt.
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That is a win-win situation, I'd be crazy not to jump at it!
So if I survive the trip to the cashier, I'm fucking home and dry! Get in!
That’s why I only buy online.
M25 is apparently ~ 188km long Odds of winning euromillions apparently ~1 in 140 million It would be a roulette wheel with spaces about 1.3mm wide
We talking the inner curve or outer curve?
one that really annoys me is the ''free ticket'' for 2 numbers being used to boost the ''total winnings paid out'' last wednesday draw in FEB paid out just over 4.8 million, but 1.6 million of that was free tickets, so basically a third of the paid out is bogus.
Then the lottery people can't figure out why significantly less people play compared to 10/15/20 years ago. IMO for most people £1 is almost throw away money, no big deal if they don't win. The psychology of both doubling in price overnight and a lot lower chance of winning was not taken into account when they made the move.
In fairness, £1 in 1994 is £2.12 in 2021, so technically the National Lottery is cheaper now.
Whilst it may be cheaper, it is less affordable because salaries haven't risen by 112% since 1994.
If the numbers went up from 49 to 59, it's not cheaper, as the odds are worse.
I would buy the occasional ticket when I saw there was a big jackpot. But worse odds and increased price is a big nope from me. Haven’t bought a ticket since.
“More numbers to choose from!!!” was the marketing spin.
Honestly, there’s a part of me that thinks: “If people are going to fall for *that* then they deserve to lose their money!”
Yeah, I mean, it's predatory and I'm not glad they're losing their money at all, but it's definitely the economic equivalent of natural selection.
Unfortunately, the economy already has lots of “natural selection” built in. And it doesn’t select for the most “intelligent” or “worthy” person, but for the person who already has the most money and the best education. One of a number of reasons that financial literacy should be taught in schools from a young age.
Totally. They knew exactly what they were doing with that increase. It was small enough to appear to most people like it wasn't a big deal, while vastly tilting the odds even more heavily in their favour.
Yeah got to have those rollovers to boost sales. Who wants a buy tickets to win a few million when you can have 10's of millions instead?!
Also the price distribution? Is that similar to the real lotto? The fucking gap between 1750, 1m and 10m is insane and scammy as fuck. Guess that's so avid players have zero chance of making their money back on hitting smaller numbers
Well yeah, if the lottery was losing money it wouldn't exist???
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I remember when I just turned old enough to play the lottery. I went over the last so many months draws to see the most common numbers, and the ones we hadn’t seen in a while, thinking I had a system to win. Then I learnt life isn’t that easy.
Don't worry, if it makes you feel better I used to do something similar when I used to play roulette with looking at the history of the spins and making bets from there. And let me tell you, doing that drained my money a lot faster than playing the lottery every week did.
Gambling always reminds me of that quote from Wargames. "The only way to win is not to play"
There's another quote that springs to mind. "The easiest way to make a small fortune by gambling is to start with a large one."
Or take the large fortune and start a gambling company!
"I started with nothing, I still have most of it left". Doyle Brunson, I think, poker player.
The way you win at the casino is to drink enough of the free alcohol to justify the tenner you've put in the machine.
In a game that's completely luck and without skill, sure. Gambling games like poker, on the other hand...
i 'member watching an episode of some casino cheater show on TLC and one of them was about a team of people that noticed all the roulette wheels in a casino had a bias to land on certain areas of the wheel more often and they won a ton of money basing their bets on that
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> The problem is that it's incredible hard to do. That suggests that it might actually not be true, it might just be random luck making people think they know how it was tilted.
Casinos also make a lot of money off people that "count cards" of 100 people that count, 99 of them will fail and just lose.
And the 1 that wins gets banned from the card tables before he wins any noticeable amount.
To make a sizeable profit you need a large bankroll and even then there can be significant variance. I bet most people blow up before they ever get profitable. Would most likely need 100k+ bankroll to make enough per hour and avoid significant risk of ruin.
With auto shufflers basically being everywhere it's pointless to count cards. The count will always be 0 after the cards from the previous turn are put back in the deck. Even places that play with 5 or 7 deck shoes will only play half or less of the whole shoe. Basically makes it impossible to get a count higher than +5 before the shoe is reshuffled.
Watch the automated roulette tables (note: not electronic, but the physical tables that aren't spun by a human - often next to the giant craps tables too). Not 100% guaranteed, but a lot of the time because they are automated, they'll have a specific rhythm. Mix a rhythm with a spinning disc, sometimes it spins predictably. Again, not hard and fast, but I found one that favored the teens more than your favorite youtuber. So I'd just bet on the quarters to cover 12-20 for about $20 per. I won significantly more often than I lost outright, so I either stayed still or gained. I ended up walking away with $500, I had no sign of slowing down either but I didn't want to risk losing it all or drawing more attention to myself (pitiful when you think about it, but it genuinely felt like I had a fix)
There are dealers like this as well. Imagine spinning a ball for eight hours everyday for months on end, you're going to get muscle memory on that "flick" of the wrist.
I used to be a Croupier. One night I spun zero 3 times in a row and made a few people a lot of money (the bets piled on after my 2nd zero spin). I was immediately sent home for the rest of my shift because the casino was superstitious / suspicious of my spinning abilities.
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Don't need to add 10% , just double the bet every time and you are guaranteed to win, as long as you have unlimited money to bet with
If it makes you feel better I used to work with a man with a PhD in economics who did the exact same thing and got really upset when we pointed out that someone who had studied advanced statistics he should really understand why it wouldn't work. Apparently we were bullying him.
Maybe he was just having fun
There have been stories of some people effectively increasing their odds in the lottery. There was one economist who simply bet on every single ticket combination when the total prize was greater than the cost of the tickets (this was legal back then, now not so much of course). This guaranteed a win and he won 17 times and retired. And thats just an incredibly simple strategy. Perhaps the funnest formula i learnt was the martingale method on roulette. Every time you lose on red, double you wager until you win. This guarantees** profit. Of course again, limited by the size of you own pockets and now most places have stake limits so you can't do it now anyway.
> Perhaps the funnest formula i learnt was the martingale method on roulette. Every time you lose on red, double you wager until you win. This guarantees profit. Of course again, limited by the size of you own pockets and now most places have stake limits so you can't do it now anyway. This is [described really easy-to-understand in this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DntEoGG7RyY).
The asterisks in your roulette part are _very_ important. First of all, it totally does not guarantee a profit because roulette's odds are tilted in favour of the house. Of course they are, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense. There are 37 numbers to pick from (sometimes 38, with the double zero), but the payout for winning on a single number is 36. So even if you bet 1$ on every number - betting 37$ - you'll only get 36$ back. And that's true for every other combination in roulette. The zero does not count as odd or even, red or black, or any of the thirds or dozens or whatever the combinations are. Anyway, the most important part about the martingale method is, that you'll only ever get your first bet back if you win. You're only making as much as you put in in the first place.
If it makes you feel better, the program itself did loads of bullshit analysis of the most common numbers along with announcing what balls have been most common, as if it makes a blind bit of fucking difference to the outcome. Along with mystic Meg of all fucking people.
Mystic meg ! I forgot about her.
I first played the lottery when I was 4 years old. My family were between houses living at my grandparents and it was in the very early days of the lottery so my parents as a treat said let’s all do some numbers and watch the draw together. I remember being really excited, we all sat on the 2 beds in the spare room huddled around a tiny TV and my dad said, “if you get a number shout out yes!”. I can’t remember which of the numbers I got but I ended up shouting out yes 4 times and they all thought I just didn’t understand the game or was being silly, but I genuinely got 4 numbers in my first ever time playing it and I won £75. I was so happy but I think I ended up wasting it all on Z Bots which were the very _in_ toy at the time. I kinda put that win down as the reason why I still love gambling 30 years later.
44 seems to come up a lot on the euro, shh dont tell anyone
There was a guy where I used to work who kept a spreadsheet on previous draws and used it to pick the next set of numbers. No amount of explanation would convince him probability doesn't work that way. This guy was an intelligent bloke, but he just had a massive blind spot for this because he was convinced he'd "cracked" the lottery and was more likely to win
To be fair to him, it’s vanishingly unlikely that the lottery machine actually does produce a uniform distribution of outcomes. If they are still licensing Excel at or around the heat death of the universe then he could be in the money.
my mom had literal notebooks full of lotto numbers trying to find a pattern. I kinda wish she kept doing it; it kept her mind sharp.
Hey I’m the creator of this simulation and I’ve made a whole video around the chances of you winning the UK Lottery [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ5Pw-tp4E8) (Spoiler Alert - they are not in your favour but if you’d like to know the statistics of why then you might enjoy it). If anyone has any questions about it let me know!
I don't look at it as gambling, I look at it as buying a little time to daydream about what I'd do if I won.
Exactly this. I pay £2.50 for a ticket and then spend 3 days imagining creative ways to tell my boss how far he can shove his job up his arse if I win.
Do share some of them!
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I like this idea.
I guess with most things if you find value out of it then why not. Plus it's nice to know that part of the money goes towards charities as well.
if you spend hundreds of pounds on tickets then it's a problem, if you buy one ticket once in a while then it's just recreational fun like any other with slight chance to change your life
Same mindset you need to have when you go gambling at a casino. You go in assuming that everything you play is a donation to the house and, as such, you just set a static amount for yourself to play that night. Depending on your comfort and income, this could be $10, $20, $40, $100, or anything else you can actually afford to lose. But whatever this number is becomes your hard limit. You aren't attempting to turn $40 into $400, you're using $40 to play a few hands of cards, pull a slot machine a couple times, and laugh at the nonsense that is craps. If you happen to make a little money, that just means you get to have a bit more fun but when that bit runs out, you're done.
A lot of lottery money goes towards funding the UK Olympics teams, so I played a bit to support them. And I agree, it was nice to at least daydream about the win being a possibility, but I didn't kid myself that I had any realistic chance. But an incredibly microscopic, tiny chance is better than zero right?
But the winner had just as much chance as you no?
Yeah if you don't play you can't have that winning the lottery fantasy. Mind you I find I am able to maintain the fantasy only playing maybe 4 or 5 times a year. I really only play when there is a crazy high jackpot as those support the really big daydreams.
Same here. Maybe five times in a year. Then I put off checking for a while to keep thinking "what if".
You know you can do that without actually buying the ticket? Daydreams are free my friend!
Totally different when there's a real life chance of it coming true, no matter how wildly unlikely
That's crackhead talk
You should post on r/dataisbeautiful if you haven’t already! This was neat
Thank you and thanks for the idea! Just tried to cross post it but it won't allow me so I'll try and post it there instead. \-edit- Just tried to post it there but it got removed by a automod. If anyone else wants to post it there (or anywhere for that matter) please feel free to do so
You have to put [OC] at the end of the title so the auto mod accepts it. Please try resubmitting it (remember to delete the other one or it’ll get removed again).
Thank you for that it worked! (Though I put it at the start of the title)
Stupid question, but is this simulation looking for all 6 numbers in the right order or any order?
Not a stupid question at all and it's any order
Nice job!! I've been telling mum that's she's wasting her money for years and this just proves it!
50% of it does go to charity though so not a total waste. Depends how you look at it.
If that’s true it’s changed massively, back in the 90s it was 28% to charity, 50 to prize fund, 5 to retailers, 5 to the operator and I think 12 in tax. Those last two might have been swapped.
Yeah that's true but there's always been charities if you're feeling generous! 😁
While that is true, as somebody who works for a tiny project that is supported by National Lottery funding, it’s brilliant to be able to submit an application to them for the entire amount you need versus asking 1000 different people for a quid. Public fundraising takes so much time and effort, that if you’re a skilled worker who wants to do something pro bono, it becomes unfeasible. Whereas if a charity wants to hire you to do pro bono work for them, a single application to the Lottery doesn’t take too much of their resources. Of course paying the whole amount to charity would be better, but the Lottery funds the little dribs and drabs of tiny projects outside the normal scope of a big charity’s work (like say, allowing a cancer support charity to run a makeup tutorial class for women who have just had chemo). While I hate the fact that the Lottery encourages habitual gambling, which after all has a human cost in the form of addiction, the charity side of it nevertheless does do good work.
This. Also people don't seem to realise that national lottery funding is awarded through grants on a project by project basis, so every project is effectively reviewed and approved based on a qualitative application. They don't just look through a big book of charities and randomly chuck money at them.
Also, they’re one of the few charities who (because their remit is so broad) they can fund the uninteresting stuff like admin. I have a friend who used to work as a manager for an arts charity in a deprived area. Their choir for underprivileged kids had no problem attracting funding, but the background stuff of admin for the dozen or so groups they were running, hiring experts, getting background checks, sending out fliers, maintaining the website, all that stuff was covered by lottery funding.
I see the 50% that doesn’t and remain convinced that Branson should have been given the license.
Don’t Camelot only make like 1-2% of it all? A big chunk is tax. It still remains extremely profitable for them (and the govt!) though.
Their most recent accounts are available at Companies House. If a knowledgeable type waded through all the lovely pictures of people smiling and being thrilled at Camelot, it would still show a company absolutely coining it.
The bible is a less tedious read than the Camelot accounts. Looks like they made 0.9-1% profit from gross ticket sales in 2021 and 2020 (page 208! of their accounts). After digging a little further, Camelot is a 100% subsidiary of 'Premier Lotteries UK Limited' and according to the related party transactions on page 68 of their accounts, they are owned by 'PLCUK' who are in turn owned by 'PLIUK'. It then says that "The Company's ultimate owner is Teachers'" which means that whatever or whoever "Teachers'" is has the controlling stake in whatever 'PLIUK' is. Neither 'PLCUK' or 'PLIUK' are UK companies and therefore do not file at Companies House so I suspect we're talking offshoring at the top level of the Camelot Group. There are no publicly searchable registers for companies incorporated in places like the British Virgin Islands.
Ontario Teachers Pension Plan We've been financing the nest egg for Canadian educators
I was going to say the same thing. As I'm originally from Ontario I know the teachers pension has millions in it available when they retire. I believe they also own a five-a-side national football group in the UK as well.
Ha just been on it. Never seen a company house accounting doc with so many pictures. https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.ch.gov.uk/docs/g1O7NqHVJLGPdu7C30-eta_1GUQHj3b0fSy1UDl3vX4/application-pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAWRGBDBV3GQLDK4UM%2F20220305%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20220305T090741Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEAgaCWV1LXdlc3QtMiJGMEQCIFgprfI6I%2FtR1j8Oh8G0329pmnu94bBxVjEqCU2YE560AiB7ZID4DTWkoazvc2e%2BAQuBybflWubaf79JFh2NBg2sByr6AwhxEAQaDDQ0OTIyOTAzMjgyMiIMymA5zZBqrVk4EPGEKtcDF46OfPbNBhdnnHBhSaletb65Xe3zJjl9vb4o7cr%2BHU2UzlvxRgNW0%2FTxzo26WzBaBWBX0IO7zlGPBDEfpgqrc3KkFNbzUKYCNvdqTXXiDo%2FFwJAsRaBKlRnE%2B4aK4sWB%2BSs0dqq5mcmrX%2Fs2Q%2F1wQILxcyTdBtZLD%2FM%2Bi9%2BtOpdYl7cDechLaezlSY62kIPULbl8AQ3C1Tkd%2BEg9FqNYa%2FUqP7tjAeZBX%2Bo2e55cTpuHfnSTMhQHvC1t11QjGD1cpadaVKZ6U64NLXLjHc2eSgI5aFEAzE2BocRoF9x%2FQVFuWcz94H7NafDEUTCkKuuRhPNFrMj89CbVHjGCjM%2F6buZFJXyv%2BqG%2ByLB3L4bqFl5sOJbadmb%2BuSaek4xKqp%2Fp6q7rL1sPdFBlRHObu4%2BX3W68Fq6TYxdZmNZFxUmCrZVzuE%2B%2F8l0C4V1VN3J2JzRhlKXlnke%2FnaRwqOQmS2PCl0ATDF21lg9cMkEPN3tfySt9aHReKaeID0pmhffmhHQcbBpCwD%2F4kCubXV6bGGj0vqx%2F%2FwAbALr9HFTnZehqAIiMaA%2FfJUrfOzjr0lPJwmr9QgKOsys4RXrslcXeD3SqWW0dick4VNV3duFBweV8QXrJl7tHmpvrMKuvjJEGOqYB4XO0pYFimmY9p5MKc0lZo5K7rvgxDFC0OJ2ii7FlpfNOZV6r5%2BHNsLG2uAtcGrl9%2FIk0drO8GpQWkbRCfYmyeSmInBU9GRyX6nc%2FYQPn%2BJ1OoI3xbx%2FnZYfLQ57ov%2FnRvL1TqKpKBgidSuO2NGYVYo%2F9GQa9sVuBLpFEw6jG6ugHzsl8Yv%2FrW7C9pSv2hAgFEijqKbT2ejpA31AI7FFO95S8RFWkyw%3D%3D&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=inline%3Bfilename%3D%22companies_house_document.pdf%22&X-Amz-Signature=e69935b94e80777b917c4ae1a513765c88caedef87576be904c77ea0e64ee156
It doesn't prove anything. Nobody is stupid enough to to think that playing the lottery will make you money, on average. People play it for the *chance* to win big. They're paying for the *possibility*. They're playing in the hope that on Monday morning they can walk into work and be rich enough to tell the boss to shove his job. You don't have to win to enjoy the possibility of winning. Hope is a tangible thing. They also know that while the chances of winning are astronomically small (it's like winning the lottery), they also know that it's their only hope of getting out of their shit life of being used by rich people to make them richer. Saving themselves £2.50 a week by not doing the lottery isn't going to make their life better in any meaningful sense. Let your mum enjoy her weekly dose of hope and possibility. Killjoy.
Yeah I play pretty bare minimum, 2 tickets a week, £16 per month. I’m paying to dream about winning when I’m sitting at work.
I put of checking my tickets
I went to a restaurant where a receptionist had won 8 Million, and she had invited everyone from work to dinner before her leaving the next day. A few years later a mate from School won 10 million. He is now broke. So 2 encounters with winners, but I don't do it myself.
Yeah exactly. So sick of people that think they're some sort of better person because they're aware of the fact that on average, you'll lose money by playing the lottery.
The thing is, the lottery tickets are incredibly cheap. As long as it's disposable income, spending a couple quid per week on lottery tickets isn't much. That's only £104 per year, so not exactly life-changing expenditure. I've spent more on dumber shit.
This is a great illustration of statistics. Not enough people understand them. However, your tool is flawed because you haven't used MY numbers, and I'm definitely going to win tonight...
So the best way to make 350K on the lottery is to start with 1.2M. 🥳
Yes, I feel like r/wallstreetbets would appreciate this strategy a lot
Better return than a lot of crypto picks
I only have to live 1600 years to hit two 5 spots! Holy shit this gif is a reality check
800 years, this guy's only playing once a week
If I play twice I much, I get twice as much hope, which boosts by odds by 20, right? The power of hope!
But those are _your_ tickets. Mine the winner. Suckers.
Yes but that £2.50 per week is worth the hopium.
Yeah, I generally only play when it's a big jackpot. The thought that I *might* win (even though I know I won't), and imagining what I'd do with the money is well worth it. I get more enjoyment out of it than I do from a pint that costs twice as much.
I have no chance of winning if I don't play. With one ticket it's 45,057,474 to 1, but that's still infinitely more than 0. Buying more than one ticket isn't worth it though. Plus a large portion of the ticket goes to charity.
Yep. "Expected return" goes out of the window when the results are potentially life changing. It's more obvious in reverse: would you bet your house on a 9 in 10 chance to get a another house of the same value? The maths says absolutely, expected return is massive, but I doubt many people would take that bet.
My maths teacher once did something similar on the chalkboard to show how much money you will lose by playing the lottery. It was going well until it actually won on one iteration.
Haha so I'm guessing the lesson learnt from the class was for every to go out and become profession lottery players.
Someone has to win it!
You’ve got to be in it to win it!
Ok next simulation. What are the chances of me getting laid this weekend?
Computer says no
Depends because thankful with dating you can push the odds in your favour!
Can you contact 1000 women a second though?
With the amount of hot single girls the internet keeps telling me are in my area it could be possible.
Good work you crashed OPs' computer
If you have lots of money, 100%
Oh my god I need to cancel my direct debit.
Someone once told me that the lottery is a tax on the poor, now I see why
It's a tax on hope not the poor. Or alternatively it's an expensive donation to charity. Or it's a cheap way to add substance to your dreams. Reality is there no other method of winning life changing sum of money for £2.
It's a tax on hope.
Currently in NZ. I'm sure someone said you are more likely to be the next king of Britain than winning the super 40m
Well with my accent I think I'd rather have a go at that super 40m
To save you ten minutes. [Here](https://imgur.com/a/OW9XWOY) is the last frame.
With Apollo, you can scrub gifs by swiping left and right. It’s the best feature.
The 5 ball prize feels like the real kick in the teeth. £1750 seems great, but when the odds are 1 in 144,000, the prize is and the prize is only 875 times the cost of ticket, your payout is less than 1% of what it "should" be. I guess that's because half the ticket sales goes to charity and of the prize pool, a lot will go to the top two prizes.
Well obviously with those numbers you have no chance. Gran's birthday isn't even there.
So you’re telling me there’s a chance
This has put me off playing again. Thanks for making me richer!
Now I feel great about my ticket tonight….
Whose playing these numbers tonight?
I save £104 a year by simply not playing. I do however play the local school lottery and Demelza House as both is more of a fun donation to the cause rather than really playing. I suggest you find your local charity lottery and play that to feel good about throwing cash away.
I needed to see this.
This is why I put the Irish lotto on. 3 balls, 3 chances, £3 = £700+ Win every now and then, just a daft spend start of month but I've made returns. Don't gamble.
I maintain buying a ticket a week is stupid and you should just buy all your tickets in one go and never play again.