There was a syndicate at work when the UK lottery started. I persuaded them, well some of them, the rest went along with it without comprehending, that it's be

There was a syndicate at work when the UK lottery started. I persuaded them, well some of them, the rest went along with it without comprehending, that it's better to buy N tickets in one game than one ticket in each of N games. Further, we used a set of 210 tickets that guaranteed a `match 3 of 6', i.e. GBP10 win. (Tickets are GBP1 each.) So the syndicate saved instead of playing and once we had enough we queued and bought the tickets, causing a few grumbles from the Sainsbury's customers behind me in the queue. We had just one ticket win anything. It matched 5 of 6, and our 6th was one away from the `bonus' ball. So we won about GBP3,500. If we'd have got the bonus, it would have been 100-ish times more! I tried to convince my fellows that we were lucky, but, instead of saving gradually for the next play, they put some of their winnings back in so they could play the 210 tickets again the following week. They won GBP10. Actually, 211 tickets were played, because quality checks showed one has been miss-filled but naturally we didn't want to drop the erroneous one. :-)