8 ms·

You need 27 tickets to guarantee a win on the UK National Lottery

53 points by jamespetercook 3y ago

osullip 3y ago
Not worth promoting mathmatical oddities that encourage people to gamble, in my opinion.
- raspyberr 3y ago
  Surely you can't be serious. This site promotes social media companies all the time which you could easily argue is a much larger cause of problems in the world than gambling.
- cantSpellSober 3y ago
  They actually promote the opposite: > For a more philosophical discussion of the National Lottery and its implementation for supporting charitable causes, we recommend David Runciman’s article in the London Review of Books https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n04/david-runciman/the-plot-to-make-us-stupid https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n04/david-runciman/the-p...
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  £2.00 * 27 is a guarantee to win something, with the most likely outcome a "Free Lucky Dip", or a £2.00 value. This is swaying no one's opinion.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- swarnie 3y ago
  The UK lottery does a lot of good with its funds and should be mentally separated from other betting/gambling firms in my opinion. If you want to "gamble" its the best option, if you don't you can always wait for the government to inflate your cash away or spend it on Hilton rooms for sailors.
  - SeanLuke 3y ago
    In no universe is the UK lottery good. All lotteries, the UK lottery included, are effectively sucking money out of the poor. It is profoundly, grotesquely regressive. If the UK wanted to have an ethical, legitimate mechanism for distributing funds, it should levy a progressive tax that raises the same amount of money as the lottery.
    - swarnie 3y ago
      Rishi already taxes the tits off anything he can recall after consuming half a tin of Dulux, please no more taxation. My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders. If you want a small gamble and are adult enough to have financial independence its your best bet. If you don't or.. don't its totally optional.
      - SeanLuke 3y ago
        > My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders. That's like saying burglary is the clear moral winner over murder. While we all would prefer to be burgled than murdered, I think it's fair to say that burglary is very, very bad.
  - dagw 3y ago
    If you want to "gamble" its the best option The national lottery has an expected return of roughly 50% of your bet. They give about 30% of your bet to charity. So if you gamble £100, you'll end up with £50 in your pocket and £30 donated to charity. Blackjack on the other hand returns roughly 90% of your bets over time if you play well. So if you donate £40 to charity and take the remaining £60 to a blackjack table you'll end up with more money going to charity and with more money in your pocket.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      > take the remaining £60 to a blackjack table Of course, "take the remaining 60 pounds" is ill-posed; what does that mean, make 60 bets of 1 pound and stop? Play a single 60 pound bet hand? Because that's the conditions under which you could expect to bring 60 and typically leave with ~54. If you show up with 60 pounds but bet well over 60 cumulatively you're going to end up with much less.
- Finnucane 3y ago
  crypto enters the chat.
watson 3y ago
Matt Parker video on the subject: https://youtu.be/zYkmIxS4ksA https://youtu.be/zYkmIxS4ksA
thebruce87m 3y ago
It’s currently £2 per play so £54 for 27 tickets. Matching two numbers on the last draw was rewarded with a £5 prize and a free lucky dip, but I think the £5 was only because it had rolled-over too many times.
forinti 3y ago
Not a "win" in the financial aspect of the game: "... they matched just two balls on three of the tickets, the reward being three lucky dip tries on a subsequent lottery, each of which came to nothing. Since a ticket costs £2, the experiment represented a loss to the authors of £54. This unfortunate incident therefore serves both as a verification of our result and of the principle that one should expect to lose money when gambling."
- acomjean 3y ago
  When I was young I had a friend who bought one Massachusetts (US) lottery ticket a week. I remember he "won" (basically got his money back). When he went to cash out the cashier asked him, "do you want the money.. or another ticket". He took the another ticket and promptly lost. lesson learned. You can't win if you don't play, but 2 tickets doesn't increase your odds significantly. Where I worked there was a convenience store store. I got to know the owners a bit. One day they were posting a sign "People at our store won $850,000 on the lottery last year". I said, "wow thats a lot". She turned, shook her head and said "I know what they've spent... its not a lot." and proceeded into a mini tirade against gambling, which she promptly stopped when a customer entered the store. Its profitiable. But in the US with sports gambling everywhere, I wonder if lotteries have lost their luster.
  - forinti 3y ago
    That's the Law of Large Numbers working. A friend of mine won a small but not insignificant amount in a lottery and then "reinvested" it in the lottery and, as expected, lost it all.
  - angry_moose 3y ago
    There's a few Powerball Simulators (largest US lottery) out there - simulate buying 1 ticket a week indefinitely. It usually works out to about a -90% ROI, though I did just somewhat undermine my point by hitting $2,000,000 (5 white balls + powerplay) after 246 years and becoming profitable. First time I've ever hit on one of these, I let one go for several millenia one time. http://adamlamers.com/lottery_simulator http://adamlamers.com/lottery_simulator
column 3y ago
On this theme, I really enjoyed the movie "Jerry and Marge go large" with Bryan Cranston. Based on a true story!
gadders 3y ago
If you were going to run a syndicate with 27 entrants, would you be better off buying these 27 tickets or a random bunch of 27 tickets in terms of getting a jackpot? Or is there no difference in terms of likelihood of getting a significant win?
- swarnie 3y ago
  These 27 ensure whatever gets pulled you will match two. Or to put it another way, this system ensures you only lose £52 a week maximum before any additional free lucky dips or rolldowns.
- cschmidt 3y ago
  This paper is focused on the little prizes. The odds of winning the jackpot will be the same for any play. In fact the only thing you can do in the lottery is to avoid "popular" sequences like birthdays etc, so that if you do win you don't have to split it with a bunch of people. A lottery in the Philippines famously had 433 winners, who all played 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and 54. (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/asia/philippines-grand-lotto-jackpot-probe-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/asia/philippines-grand-lotto-...)
  - SllX 3y ago
    The most disappointing thing here is that the number of winners wasn’t 432 or 423.
- addandsubtract 3y ago
  You have the best odds if you don't have overlapping numbers, so buying 27 deliberately is better than just getting random ones. That said, your xWin with just 27 tickets is still astronomically low.
- toast0 3y ago
  I would probably avoid using these specific tickets; someone else may have had the same idea, and that means more likelyhood of prize sharing. If you permute the numbers with a substitution cipher (randomly chosen), maybe? Personally, I'd prefer a ticket selection like this that covers all the numbers over 27 random selections that may leave some numbers open, etc; but I wouldn't be surprised if you run the numbers, assuming no prize sharing, and get the same results on any distinct 27 tickets.
sys_64738 3y ago
I bought 3 tickets back in Nov 1994 when it started in England. I never won and never bought another ticket.
- pc86 3y ago
  Ok
greenpizza13 3y ago
This kind of thinking is also explored deeply in Jordan Ellenberg's book "How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking". Great read.
duffyjp 3y ago
I've never purchased a lottery ticket but I do get a small reduction in my state property taxes from those who do, so I guess I win once a year.
FaisalAbid 3y ago
Matt Parker did a great video on this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYkmIxS4ksA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYkmIxS4ksA
keepamovin 3y ago
27 support tickets? Like... 1: Hi there! Sorry to bother you but I think I have a winning ticket for the Powerbrits Billions Megapounds but I seem to have received an error at the cashier while checking my ticket... 2: Hi, me again! Yes, in response, I made sure the ticket was for the correct lottery. And yes, the cashier was listening to me when I asked them to check it... 3: Hello, hope you're well! I'm working on getting you that cashier screenshot as well as a picture of my ticket. Just wanted to reiterate I'm sure it's a winner, and there seems to be a bug in the code... 4: Hi there! Sorry I can't take a 'clearer picture with the ticket actually visible and readable' because that's the bug in the ticket I'm telling you about! Yes, again I'm sure it was a winner, I picked the numbers myself! And now I would not like a complimentary replacement ticket for the next drawing, thank you very much! Please don't close this support ticket as completed, too, alright? What I'd like is ... [[ 21 support tickets later ]] 24: Hi friend! Yes, I'm quite sure the numbers on my ticket are 6-9-11-15-17-21, the exact numbers of the winning draw I'm hoping you'll help me collect! You can see from my recent photo that the 1 is clearly visible in a number of places and if you turn it to the left, you'll see what looks like a 5 and 7 as well. Clearly the rest of the positions have some bug where the numbers become unclear and appear to temporarily represent other numbers, but I didn't write them unclearly in the original (sorry I misplaced that!), so it is clearly a bug in your software! You know what, friend? F--- this, I have been nothing but reasonable. I think I might have to go to Hacker News and tell everybody about the terrible things that have happened as a result of this atrocious run around you've been giving me! [[ 2 support tickets later ]] 27: Oh, hi, Senior Support Analyst Manager Derrick, thank you so much for your warm and accommodating email! Why, yes, that would be delightful, I will gladly accept monthly part-payments, less taxes, deposited into my standard Bank of Ireland (Maldives) account. Terribly good of you, if I say so myself! You have a fantastic day, Derrick! I'll be sure to fill out that little "Support Questionnaire" you sent me in your last correspondence, too (probably from St Tropez idk). Fantastic stuff!
sircastor 3y ago
I have a friend who once described state lotteries as “a tax on people who can’t do math”. That’s not particularly kind or fair. To me the combination of desperation that people feel that a lottery win would resolve a lot of their problems, and how many state-run programs are dependent on lottery funds to continue to function, is indicative of how bad an idea a lottery is. It’s a trap for people who are desperate, trying to survive and a band-aid for a budget shortfall because people don’t want to pay taxes otherwise.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

osullip 3y ago

Not worth promoting mathmatical oddities that encourage people to gamble, in my opinion.

raspyberr 3y ago
Surely you can't be serious. This site promotes social media companies all the time which you could easily argue is a much larger cause of problems in the world than gambling.
cantSpellSober 3y ago
They actually promote the opposite: > For a more philosophical discussion of the National Lottery and its implementation for supporting charitable causes, we recommend David Runciman’s article in the London Review of Books https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n04/david-runciman/the-plot-to-make-us-stupid https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n04/david-runciman/the-p...
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
£2.00 * 27 is a guarantee to win something, with the most likely outcome a "Free Lucky Dip", or a £2.00 value. This is swaying no one's opinion.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
swarnie 3y ago
The UK lottery does a lot of good with its funds and should be mentally separated from other betting/gambling firms in my opinion. If you want to "gamble" its the best option, if you don't you can always wait for the government to inflate your cash away or spend it on Hilton rooms for sailors.
- SeanLuke 3y ago
  In no universe is the UK lottery good. All lotteries, the UK lottery included, are effectively sucking money out of the poor. It is profoundly, grotesquely regressive. If the UK wanted to have an ethical, legitimate mechanism for distributing funds, it should levy a progressive tax that raises the same amount of money as the lottery.
  - swarnie 3y ago
    Rishi already taxes the tits off anything he can recall after consuming half a tin of Dulux, please no more taxation. My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders. If you want a small gamble and are adult enough to have financial independence its your best bet. If you don't or.. don't its totally optional.
    - SeanLuke 3y ago
      > My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders. That's like saying burglary is the clear moral winner over murder. While we all would prefer to be burgled than murdered, I think it's fair to say that burglary is very, very bad.
- dagw 3y ago
  If you want to "gamble" its the best option The national lottery has an expected return of roughly 50% of your bet. They give about 30% of your bet to charity. So if you gamble £100, you'll end up with £50 in your pocket and £30 donated to charity. Blackjack on the other hand returns roughly 90% of your bets over time if you play well. So if you donate £40 to charity and take the remaining £60 to a blackjack table you'll end up with more money going to charity and with more money in your pocket.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > take the remaining £60 to a blackjack table Of course, "take the remaining 60 pounds" is ill-posed; what does that mean, make 60 bets of 1 pound and stop? Play a single 60 pound bet hand? Because that's the conditions under which you could expect to bring 60 and typically leave with ~54. If you show up with 60 pounds but bet well over 60 cumulatively you're going to end up with much less.
Finnucane 3y ago
crypto enters the chat.

watson 3y ago

Matt Parker video on the subject: https://youtu.be/zYkmIxS4ksA https://youtu.be/zYkmIxS4ksA

thebruce87m 3y ago

It’s currently £2 per play so £54 for 27 tickets. Matching two numbers on the last draw was rewarded with a £5 prize and a free lucky dip, but I think the £5 was only because it had rolled-over too many times.

forinti 3y ago

Not a "win" in the financial aspect of the game: "... they matched just two balls on three of the tickets, the reward being three lucky dip tries on a subsequent lottery, each of which came to nothing. Since a ticket costs £2, the experiment represented a loss to the authors of £54. This unfortunate incident therefore serves both as a verification of our result and of the principle that one should expect to lose money when gambling."

acomjean 3y ago
When I was young I had a friend who bought one Massachusetts (US) lottery ticket a week. I remember he "won" (basically got his money back). When he went to cash out the cashier asked him, "do you want the money.. or another ticket". He took the another ticket and promptly lost. lesson learned. You can't win if you don't play, but 2 tickets doesn't increase your odds significantly. Where I worked there was a convenience store store. I got to know the owners a bit. One day they were posting a sign "People at our store won $850,000 on the lottery last year". I said, "wow thats a lot". She turned, shook her head and said "I know what they've spent... its not a lot." and proceeded into a mini tirade against gambling, which she promptly stopped when a customer entered the store. Its profitiable. But in the US with sports gambling everywhere, I wonder if lotteries have lost their luster.
- forinti 3y ago
  That's the Law of Large Numbers working. A friend of mine won a small but not insignificant amount in a lottery and then "reinvested" it in the lottery and, as expected, lost it all.
- angry_moose 3y ago
  There's a few Powerball Simulators (largest US lottery) out there - simulate buying 1 ticket a week indefinitely. It usually works out to about a -90% ROI, though I did just somewhat undermine my point by hitting $2,000,000 (5 white balls + powerplay) after 246 years and becoming profitable. First time I've ever hit on one of these, I let one go for several millenia one time. http://adamlamers.com/lottery_simulator http://adamlamers.com/lottery_simulator

column 3y ago

On this theme, I really enjoyed the movie "Jerry and Marge go large" with Bryan Cranston. Based on a true story!

gadders 3y ago

If you were going to run a syndicate with 27 entrants, would you be better off buying these 27 tickets or a random bunch of 27 tickets in terms of getting a jackpot? Or is there no difference in terms of likelihood of getting a significant win?

swarnie 3y ago
These 27 ensure whatever gets pulled you will match two. Or to put it another way, this system ensures you only lose £52 a week maximum before any additional free lucky dips or rolldowns.
cschmidt 3y ago
This paper is focused on the little prizes. The odds of winning the jackpot will be the same for any play. In fact the only thing you can do in the lottery is to avoid "popular" sequences like birthdays etc, so that if you do win you don't have to split it with a bunch of people. A lottery in the Philippines famously had 433 winners, who all played 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and 54. (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/asia/philippines-grand-lotto-jackpot-probe-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/asia/philippines-grand-lotto-...)
- SllX 3y ago
  The most disappointing thing here is that the number of winners wasn’t 432 or 423.
addandsubtract 3y ago
You have the best odds if you don't have overlapping numbers, so buying 27 deliberately is better than just getting random ones. That said, your xWin with just 27 tickets is still astronomically low.
toast0 3y ago
I would probably avoid using these specific tickets; someone else may have had the same idea, and that means more likelyhood of prize sharing. If you permute the numbers with a substitution cipher (randomly chosen), maybe? Personally, I'd prefer a ticket selection like this that covers all the numbers over 27 random selections that may leave some numbers open, etc; but I wouldn't be surprised if you run the numbers, assuming no prize sharing, and get the same results on any distinct 27 tickets.

sys_64738 3y ago

I bought 3 tickets back in Nov 1994 when it started in England. I never won and never bought another ticket.

pc86 3y ago
Ok

greenpizza13 3y ago

This kind of thinking is also explored deeply in Jordan Ellenberg's book "How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking". Great read.

duffyjp 3y ago

I've never purchased a lottery ticket but I do get a small reduction in my state property taxes from those who do, so I guess I win once a year.

FaisalAbid 3y ago

Matt Parker did a great video on this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYkmIxS4ksA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYkmIxS4ksA

keepamovin 3y ago

27 support tickets? Like... 1: Hi there! Sorry to bother you but I think I have a winning ticket for the Powerbrits Billions Megapounds but I seem to have received an error at the cashier while checking my ticket... 2: Hi, me again! Yes, in response, I made sure the ticket was for the correct lottery. And yes, the cashier was listening to me when I asked them to check it... 3: Hello, hope you're well! I'm working on getting you that cashier screenshot as well as a picture of my ticket. Just wanted to reiterate I'm sure it's a winner, and there seems to be a bug in the code... 4: Hi there! Sorry I can't take a 'clearer picture with the ticket actually visible and readable' because that's the bug in the ticket I'm telling you about! Yes, again I'm sure it was a winner, I picked the numbers myself! And now I would not like a complimentary replacement ticket for the next drawing, thank you very much! Please don't close this support ticket as completed, too, alright? What I'd like is ... [[ 21 support tickets later ]] 24: Hi friend! Yes, I'm quite sure the numbers on my ticket are 6-9-11-15-17-21, the exact numbers of the winning draw I'm hoping you'll help me collect! You can see from my recent photo that the 1 is clearly visible in a number of places and if you turn it to the left, you'll see what looks like a 5 and 7 as well. Clearly the rest of the positions have some bug where the numbers become unclear and appear to temporarily represent other numbers, but I didn't write them unclearly in the original (sorry I misplaced that!), so it is clearly a bug in your software! You know what, friend? F--- this, I have been nothing but reasonable. I think I might have to go to Hacker News and tell everybody about the terrible things that have happened as a result of this atrocious run around you've been giving me! [[ 2 support tickets later ]] 27: Oh, hi, Senior Support Analyst Manager Derrick, thank you so much for your warm and accommodating email! Why, yes, that would be delightful, I will gladly accept monthly part-payments, less taxes, deposited into my standard Bank of Ireland (Maldives) account. Terribly good of you, if I say so myself! You have a fantastic day, Derrick! I'll be sure to fill out that little "Support Questionnaire" you sent me in your last correspondence, too (probably from St Tropez idk). Fantastic stuff!

sircastor 3y ago

I have a friend who once described state lotteries as “a tax on people who can’t do math”. That’s not particularly kind or fair. To me the combination of desperation that people feel that a lottery win would resolve a lot of their problems, and how many state-run programs are dependent on lottery funds to continue to function, is indicative of how bad an idea a lottery is. It’s a trap for people who are desperate, trying to survive and a band-aid for a budget shortfall because people don’t want to pay taxes otherwise.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]