How The Lottery Works Uk
Online purchase of tickets from the National Lottery website is restricted to people who have a UK bank account (for debit card or direct debit purposes), and are resident in the UK.
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People's Postcode Lottery manage society lotteries for 20 different Postcode Trusts. Have a look at our Prize Draw Calendar which highlights the Postcode Trust promoting the draws. 32% of the cost of each ticket goes to the Postcode Trust promoting the draw, 40% is used for prizes and 28% is used for our lottery operating expenses. In 2020 our ticket sales were £487 Million. Pick 5 numbers from 1-50 and 2 Lucky Stars from 1-12. Or try a Lucky Dip ® for randomly selected numbers. Choose to play on a Tuesday or Friday – or both, then the number of weeks you'd like to play. You can play up to 7 lines of numbers and buy up to 10 play slips at a time. Play the lottery, support Northumberland - it’s that simple! Tickets for the lottery cost just £1 a week. Each ticket has a 1 in 50 chance to win a prize each week, with a top prize of £25,000! That’s a better chance of winning than the National Lottery or the Health Lottery. Each ticket has six numbers and each number is between 0 and 9. Play the lottery, support East Hampshire District - it’s that simple! Tickets for the lottery cost just £1 a week. Each ticket has a 1 in 50 chance to win a prize each week, with a top prize of £25,000! That’s a better chance of winning than the National Lottery or the Health Lottery. Each ticket has six numbers and each number is between.
The UK National Lottery began in November 1994. Optimistic statisticians hoped that the surrounding publicity might increase interest in ideas of chance and probability, and perhaps even enhance the nation's numeracy.
Hot tips
In the early days of the Lottery, it was quite common to see newspaper articles that looked back on what numbers had recently been drawn, and attempted to identify certain numbers as 'due' (they hadn't appeared for a dozen draws), other numbers as 'hot' (having occurred several times in succession), much in the manner of racing tipsters studying form. The question of how these inanimate rubberspheres, whirling around a plastic tub, were supposed to be influenced by previous draws was never addressed. Few such articles appear now; without these words being specifically used, it does seem to be generally believed that the outcome of each draw is independent of the rest, and that each of the possible combinations has the same chance every time.
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The game has tightly drawn rules about the amount of prize money available, and how it shall be allocated. The mathematics of counting then allow you to work out your winning chances, and how much your prize might be. For the principal game, players must select six different numbers from the list {1,2,...,49}; in the Lottery draw, six of these numbers are selected at random as 'main' numbers,and a seventh is also chosen (the Bonus number). Players win some prize if their selection matches at least three of the main numbers. If they match all six main numbers, they qualify for a share of the Jackpot prize, with an average value of £2 million - and, occasionally, ten times this amount! However, less than half the money staked is returned as prizes, so, on average, you lose more than50p each time you buy a £1 ticket.
To work out the winning chances, note that the number of different choices of six numbers from a list of 49 numbers is , say. And all these combinations are taken to have an equal chance of being the six main numbers. So if you buy one ticket, your chance of a Jackpot share is 1 in , or, in round figures, one in 14 million.
It is hard to appreciate how small this figure is: for example, the chance of death within one year for a middle-aged healthy man might be one in 1,000. If so, the chance he dies within the next week is one in 52,000; within the next day about one in 365,000, within the next hour about one in nine million - still bigger than the chance of a jackpot share. Indeed, on these figures, he is aboutas likely to win a jackpot share with one ticket as he is to die in the next 40 minutes.
All those who match all six main numbers share the amount in the Jackpot pool, which depends mainly on total sales. To win a gigantic prize, you hope to be the only person with a winning ticket. What can you do to bring this about?
Really random
Very little information has been disclosed about what combinations UK players have chosen. Apparently, at one stage, 10,000 people were selecting the numbers 1 to 6, while the most popular single choice is said to be those multiples of seven, {7,14,21,28,35,42}. Of course, after every draw, we learn how many players shared the jackpot, and hence exactly how many selected that particularcombination that draw. Almost one time in six, no-one has won a jackpot share; and one time in five, one winner has scooped the entire jackpot pool. At the other extreme, 133 people selected the winning combination {7,17,23,32,38,42}, while on another occasion 57 chose {2,12,19,28,38,48}.
But the Swiss Lottery permitted Hans Riedwyl complete knowledge of player choice for one particular week; on average, each combination was chosen about twice, but he identified types of combinations that attracted far, far more players:
- previous winning combinations, going back several years;
- winning combinations from Lotteries in neighbouring countries;
- combinations that, when marked on the Lottery ticket, made straight lines, zig-zags, or symmetrical patterns;
- other systematic choices, such as last week's winning numbers, all with one added (or subtracted).
How to win more
Avoid any such systematic choices! Too many other players may think along your lines, and some may copy your selection. Be aware of the two players who split the jackpot in the Irish Lottery, both having picked their numbers using the dates of birth, ordination and death of the same priest! One idea is to choose your numbers completely at random, perhaps by use of an ordinary deck of cards(discard three of them, shuffle well the other 49), or the official Lucky Dip facility. But do not fall into the trap of believing that spreading your choices evenly across the card is the same as choosing randomly: far from it!
If the combinations listed above, with 133 and 57 winners are marked on the Lottery ticket as set out at the time (nine rows of five numbers, a bottom row with four numbers), you will see that
- every number is on a different row
- no two numbers are adjacent vertically
- no numbers are in the outside columns.
It is as though players had run their pencils down the middle of the ticket, dodging a little from side to side, thinking they were choosing at random. They were not - as their disappointing jackpot prize proved.One further factor: many players choose numbers based on family birth dates, and so the numbers 1 to 31 are be selected more often. To help avoid their choices, bias your random choice towards the higher numbers. How? Plainly, the mean value of a single number is and so the mean total over six numbers chosen at random is . The calculation for the variance is more complicated - successive choices are not independent - but Riedwyl's advice is to select your numbers at random, but then reject them en bloc unless:
- their total is at least 177
- 3,4 or 5 of them are on the edge of the ticket
- they do not form a single cluster, nor are they spread as six isolated numbers.
How Winning The Lottery Works
.The smaller prizes
We have concentrated on the prospects of winning a jackpot share, as that is the main motivation for most Lottery players. But working out the chances of the other prizes is not difficult. Call the six winning numbers the Good numbers, the other 43 the Bad numbers. So to match exactly five of the winning numbers, your selection combines five of the six Good numbers (with 6 ways to select them) along with one of the 43 Bad numbers (43 choices), making possible winning tickets. The Bonus number is just one of the Bad numbers, so six of these choices win a share of the Bonus prize, the other 252 qualify for a Match 5 prize.
Similarly, to win a Match 4 prize, you select 4 of the 6 Good numbers (in ways), along with 2 of the 43 Bad numbers (in ways), giving combinations that match exactly four winning numbers. And there are choices that give the fixed Match 3 prize of . This gives a grand total of 260,624 out of the different choices that win some prize, meaning that each ticket has chance , or about one in 54, of winning something. Buy one ticket a week, and expect about one win a year. With average luck, you will spend about before you win your first prize of more than .
The Table shows what prize (round figures) you might expect. The winning chance, at any prize level, is just the corresponding Frequency, divided by N.
| Frequency | Maximum Prize(£) | Mean Prize(£) | Minimum Prize(£) | |
| Jackpot | 1 | 22.6 million | 2 million | 122,500* |
| Bonus | 6 | 1,236,000** | 100,000 | 4,100 |
| Match 5 | 252 | 7,800 | 1,500 | 180 |
| Match 4 | 13,545 | 164 | 62 | 16 |
| Match 3 | 246,820 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
*This figure would have been about £48,500 if unwon money from a previous week had not been added to the prize fund.
**Draw 286, where £15 million was arbitrarily (and uniquely) added to the Bonus pool is omitted.
Be above average
It could be you - but it probably won't be
Statistical considerations can suggest how you might win more than these average amounts. Your aim is to choose combinations that other players tend to avoid, so we can look at the data to see when there are fewer jackpot winners than would be expected, given the level of sales. The first 850 draws contained 40 occasions where the winning combination had three consecutive numbers, suchas {34,35,36}. Taking account of the sales in those 40 draws, we would have expected about 135 jackpot winners; but there were only 88. More reliably, those 850 draws had a pair of consecutive numbers 406 times; overall, there were 25% fewer jackpot winners than expected, so again the prize tended to be correspondingly higher. Over the same period, there have been only 58 occasionson which the winning combination had three or more numbers higher than 40, but the overall number of jackpot winners in those draws is less than half the figure expected.
Whatever numbers you select, and whether or not you remain faithful to the same combination every draw, your chance of winning, and the average number of prizes, are not affected. The only 'skill' is in selecting combinations that fewer other players use, leading to higher prizes - but we have little direct knowledge of other players' choices. If, by some miracle, this article were to bewidely read and its contents splashed over the popular press, enough players might change their habits, and combinations that used to be unpopular (hence potentially more profitable) could become chosen more frequently. If you must enter the Lottery, there is much to be said for making a completely random selection of numbers.
About the author
John Haigh is Reader in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sussex. His book, Taking Chances, (now translated into Spanish and Chinese, and in a second edition) aimed at helping the layperson understand ideas of probability, is an all-time Plus favourite. You can read our review in Issue 13.
Many so-called lottery experts have made a career out of marketing their own lotto systems that are supposed to guarantee big wins. One of the most enduring methods is lottery wheeling. In this article, we’re going to take a look at what lottery wheels are, how they work, and whether they can help you win the lottery.
What is Lottery Wheeling?
Lottery wheeling is a method of buying lotto tickets where the player chooses a subset of numbers and purchases multiple combinations of those numbers. This system is supposed to increase the odds of winning the lottery. The logic behind lottery wheeling is that the player is guaranteed a winning ticket if the draw falls within a specific range of numbers.
There are three elements to lottery wheels:
- the minimum guarantee
- the amount of numbers drawn that have to fall within the set of numbers chosen to ensure a win
- the number of different selected numbers in the wheel
These elements boil down to the equation X if Y of Z, meaning you are guaranteed an X-win if Y of the winning numbers are in your set of Z chosen numbers. Lottery wheeling is based on a branch of math called combinatorial design.
How Do Lottery Wheels Work?
To create a lottery wheel, you first have to decide which type of draw you’re going to play. You then have to determine which numbers you want to focus on in your subset. Then you write down all of the possible combinations of those numbers. For example, if you choose to play pick-6 and you choose number 1 to 7 to create a group of 7 numbers, all of your possible combinations would be 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1 2 3 4 5 7, 1 2 3 4 6 7, 1 2 3 5 6 7, 1 2 4 5 6 7, 1 3 4 5 6 7, and 2 3 4 5 6 7. These combinations are the numbers you would play on your ticket.
The consensus is that lottery wheeling works best with pick-3 and pick-4 lotteries. Lottery wheeling requires buying a lot of tickets to cover all of your combinations and increase your chances of winning lower-tier prizes. However, there are three different kinds of wheels you can play, each offering different degrees of coverage.
Full wheels cover every possible combination of the chosen set of numbers. This type of wheel guarantees that you will win multiple prizes if three or more of the winning numbers are in your collection of numbers. Unfortunately, full wheels are very costly, as you must purchase many tickets to cover all possible combinations. Therefore, they may be more suitable for large groups of people who are purchasing tickets together, rather than individuals.
Abbreviated wheels do not cover all combinations, but guarantee at least one winner if a certain amount of the winning numbers fall within your set. This wheel type is a good compromise for affordability while also covering a wide range of numbers. They are more suitable than full wheels for individual players.
Key wheels are similar to an abbreviated wheel except you choose a key number that you include in all your tickets. If you feel confident that a specific number will be part of the winning numbers, then this is the best type of wheel for you.
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Famous Examples of Lottery Wheeling
There have been a few instances of people gaining a lot of success and recognition from using lottery wheeling systems. Gail Howard became known as a lottery expert thanks to her Smart Luck system for choosing lottery numbers. This system is based primarily on lottery wheels, and Howard wrote numerous books explaining the concept of wheeling. There have been over 108 documented winners of first place prizes that attribute their wins to Howard’s lottery wheeling system.
Another famous example of a person using lottery wheeling to win big is the story of Stefan Klincewicz. The Polish-Irish businessman bought 80% of 1,947,792 possible combinations in the Irish Lottery. The cost to do this was significant, and Klincewicz and his associates spent just under 1 million Irish pounds to purchase the tickets. The price paid off, though, as the group won the 1.7-million-pound jackpot. However, they had to split the prize three ways, as there were two other people with winning tickets. Klincewicz and his associates still took home a small profit thanks to the Match 4 and Match 5 prizes the tickets also won.
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Do Lottery Wheels Increase Your Chance of Winning?
Lottery wheeling aims to guarantee a minimum amount of wins per wheel. However, that guarantee depends on whether or not the winning numbers contain at least one of the numbers chosen in the subset. Mathematically, lottery wheeling does not have an impact on the expected value of your tickets. However, it does reduce the variance across all tickets of the payout compared to random number selections.
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One way in which lottery wheeling does increase your odds of winning is in the fact that players who wheel are typically purchasing many tickets. Like with lottery syndicates and lottery pools, this means that they have more chances of winning.
Conclusion
How Do Lottery Tickets Work
Lottery wheeling is a popular system of choosing numbers for the lottery. It requires that players buy multiple tickets to cover various combinations of a selected set of numbers. While there have been numerous instances of players winning big and attributing the win to lottery wheeling, there have also been many people who won by using their own lucky numbers or even Quick Pick numbers. Ultimately, the best way to increase your chances of winning is to buy more tickets to a particular draw and the absolute best method of doing that without breaking the bank is to play through a lottery syndicate, but lottery wheeling does at least allow you to choose your numbers in a systematic manner.