Lottery

[Andy008]

On the basis that the chance of winning the jackpot is 1 in 14 million, assuming that I was the director of a business with �14 million cash for investment, how would I go about buying 14 million tickets, to guarantee winning the jackpot?

[kempie]

Is it worth spending �14 million to win a jackpot worth less than this amount, which you may also have to share with other winners?

[boobesque]

plus you would need something to work out EVERY possible sequence the balls can be in, hence why its so hard to win

[Loosehead]

This has been done in the Australian lottery. They had an army of people buying all the pre worked out combinations. The lottery people smelt a rat and stopped them but at the time they had 90% of the possible numbers so they actually won. They did it on a rollover but they still could not be sure that they would not have to share the jack pot. I think in reality they did turn a profit, ie the jackpot + a lot of smaller prizes.

[twiglet4frog]

be easier to place the 14 million in a high interest account and then use the monthly interest they pay u to buy a few thousand tickets each month, that way u dont lose any of the main capital but u have a slightly better chance of adding a few million quid to it if u win the jackpot! although if i was �14 million quid richer i think i would be happy living off that interest than any extra from the lotto

[Tim Baxter]

How many tickets are sold per draw?

If it's approx 60 million then approx 4 of them (on average) will share the jackpot.  If you add in your 14 million tickets it means you and 4 others (on average)will share the prize.  Is it worth it?

[Space]

the lottery is a waste of money.
Even if you buy all the tickets, they don't pay out as much as you pay in.

[chazza]

Apparently they do not have to pay out if they can prove that someone has bought every combination of numbers.

 

The lottery is a game of chance, and by buying every combination, it is no longer chance, so thats their way out!

[WoWo]

It was done on the Irish lottery also but they have 39 numbers rather than 49 so the possible combinations were much less.

They just about broke even when taking in to account all the smaller prizes.

But on the UK lottery the number of combinations makes this a little more difficult. Lets look at some statisticts. If you purchased every combination it would mean in addition to the jackpot you would win the following (I'm using the average payout for each set of numbers)...

3 Balls Matched - 246,820 combinations @ �10 = �2,468,200

4 Balls Matched - 13,545 combinations @ �62 = �839,790

5 Balls Matched - 252 combinstions @ �1500 = �378000

5+Bouns - 6 @ � 100000 = �600,000

Thats a total of �4,339,990 so you would need a jackpot of around �10,000,000 to break even.

[QPR]

With reference to the Australian guy who did it, he got a consortium of wealthy folk to all put in, he used a computer to work out all the combinations and print directly onto the lottery slips. They won the Australian Lottery twice before they were banned and then did it in America on what was something like a quadrable rollover (over $100m), the didn't get all the tickets processed in time and had to search through all the tickets to find out if they had actually won on not, they did and then I believe were banned from American Lotteries!