Lottery - improve your odds?

Gorgeous_George

tomstickland wrote:

I haven't read all the posts in this thread properly, but I can see where you're going with the PB not getting stake back.
ie: put money in, they take the interest that they were going to pay you and that's your stake in the gambling.

In the same terms then the lottery is an account where they don't have any interest, they just take your deposit and never give it back to you.

ie: one robs you of 3% pa the other robs you of your capital.

Of course you are right.

The comparison comes when you compare like for like.

1/ Buy £3K of PBs
2/ Invest £3K in a high paying account (ISA perhaps)

PBs will typically pay back £90 i.e., 3%.

ISA typically pays 5% (mine is 6% ) and pays back £150.

So, ISA s better. Yes, there is no chance of winning a million, but then there's no chance of winning zilch, nought, nothing.

So, put your £150 interest on the lotto. You may win something. From experience, I'd expect £30 (i.e., 3 x £10) but maybe I'm not lucky. IF your £150 returns 4 correct numbers and if you only take the least popular numbers, your return for 4 numbers would more likely be three figures than two.

Of course, to benefit, you'd have to be lucky but that's the same with PBs.

Up to the end of October, Numbers 1 to 10 have been drawn 1381 times whereas numbers 40 - 49 have been drawn 1427. This minor discrepancy adds to the fact that higher numbers return better prizes in the Lotto because less people take the higher numbers.



GG

Milarky

This will depress you goto to this page and enter your six chosen numbers. Then hit enter and see how many times you would have won with those numbers in the last 50 draws. Try varying one number at a time and see how this affects the result. The best I achieved doing this was 2 match 3s - or £20 for £50 staked. But I'm sure you could find a superset of numbers which has been optimally fortunate (a real 'outlier')

Gorgeous_George

Milarky wrote:

This will depress you goto to this page and enter your six chosen numbers. Then hit enter and see how many times you would have won with those numbers in the last 50 draws. Try varying one number at a time and see how this affects the result. The best I achieved doing this was 2 match 3s - or £20 for £50 staked. But I'm sure you could find a superset of numbers which has been optimally fortunate (a real 'outlier')

... or pm me with your email address and I'll send you an Excel spreadsheet that does something similar (in my mind, better) for every draw since the Lottery began. Equally depressing.



GG

Milarky

The conclusion to all this may be (in line with the related discussion on Premium Bonds) that you should only play the Lottery for a set period (say a year) and then stop entirely and move on to a different get-rich scheme whilst saving the £1 in a jar. The rationale for this is that of 'beginner's luck': I often think of the very first person to win the Jackpot in 1994 - they didn't have to carry on 'playing' after that first draw (but I bet they did precisely because of the conviction that they were 'blessed' by 'luck' - which would continue. They may also have carried on in the belief that they 'owed' the Lottery something - so were effectively continuing to play for other winners) Anyway, The 'chances' of being 'lucky' with Premium Bonds (winning larger prizes out of proportion to their number in the prize fund) and so effectively 'beating the odds' on your 'investment' falls rapidly with time. It is precisely by continuing to hold PBs (and, by analogy, play the Lottery) for longer that the effect of sampling kicks in - so reducing the 'randomness' of your long run results and taking them ever nearer (with increased confidence) to the 'mean'.

Now should I take my own advice here and buy (say) £100 of Premium Bonds - then hold these for (say) only six months (being more 'single' chances to win in that time than my single bond would have if entered for in my expected lifetime? The interest cost would be about £2 and I would only have to wait six months to determine the result of the experiment. I would then cash in. Hmm no, I think I'll just forget about that £1 and do nothing. After all there's always the 'danger' (as in the 'gamblers ruin' problem) that I would change my mind at five months and leave the Bonds indefinitely. A parallel approach is to play the Lottery for the minimum period (say 10 draws) and stop unless you have won a prize in that time.

whambamboo

so, anyone got any tips for improving odds on betting on horses?

Twopints

Dave_Q wrote:

No it's still 1 in 14m. It doesn't matter what the first set of numbers are , so as every combination is 1 in 14 m then this applies equally to the same set of numbers.

Sorry, still not happy with this. I accept that there is a 1 in 14m chance of a particular set of 6 numbers occurring, and that the chance of the same set of numbers occurring again is the same, if they are independent.

E.g. if you toss a coin 6 times and it comes up heads each time, then the chance of it coming up heads the 7th time are still 1 in 2.

But the chances of it coming up heads 7 times in a row are NOT 1 in 2, they are 1 in (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2).

so the chances of the same 6 lottery numbers being picked "randomly" twice on the same ticket MUSt be more than 1 in 14m

Twopints

whambamboo wrote:

so, anyone got any tips for improving odds on betting on horses?

Yes, see the matched betting threads in the Gambling Introductory Loopholes forum

:beer:

ollyk

One thing I have always wanted to know regarding the lottery... is there a complete list available of all the winning draws from the very start of the game?
When I pick my new numbers I would really like to know if 4 or more have ever come up in a single draw, not just the last 50 draws!
I bet there is someone / organisation who has a complete list!!!

tomstickland

It's a waste of time though. It's random, so looking at past performance is of no use.
Same with "picking" numbers as in the suggested method. Just fill the tickets in with the numbers in order.

Tim_L

whambamboo wrote:

so, anyone got any tips for improving odds on betting on horses?

Yes, as it happens. Matched betting is one way (see the gambling board), and arbitrage betting is another.

The lottery is a terrible terrible way of gambling. Betting on horses will, given average luck and average odds, lose you about 20% of the amount staked. Betting on the lottery will lose you well over 50% of the amount you stake.

Betting as a syndicate doesn't help much, and there are some diabolical syndicate schemes around which are actually pyramid schemes using the lottery as a nominal product.

And whatever Alan Sugar says, Premium Bonds are a dire investment product. Unless you have loads of them you probably will win nothing, and even if you do your average winnings will be well under the performance of a decent savings account; there are plenty of lowish risk investments that will easily beat them.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a punt on the lottery - it adds spice to life - but no-one should look for ways of improving the odds because there are none. The only thing you can do is to improve the odds of winning a large amount if you win by choosing unpopular numbers. But if you want to actually make money from gambling, matched betting is a good place to start - you can make £500-1000 in a couple of months without risk.