Is there a positive expected value on the Lotto this week?

If only €3m of tickets are sold, will the prize fund be €21.5m ?

There should be a huge increase in sales.

Is there any downside to a big punt on this?

Even if it jumps from €3m to €20m , would that still be €10m + €19m or 29/20 ?

Brendan
 
I had not bought Lotto tickets before. The guy in the Mace shop told me that the most I could buy was €20 a day.

Is this correct?

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Is there any downside to a big punt on this?
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Based on recent results and on the theoretical odds for each line and not allowing for a big jump in sales.
The chances of winning nothing are over 94% and that doesn’t change.
The chances of winning more than €10 is 1 in 300 and that doesn’t change.
The chances of winning the jackpot of €20m outright is around 1 in 11 million and worth about €2
Chances of a share through Match 5 + Bonus ball which is 1 chance in 1.7 million which could be outright plus residual chances of the jackpot being pushed even further down the line are worth about €10
about €13 in total for each €2 line.
If sales double this roughly knocks about €6 off this figure.

The downside if you say bought 5 million lines for €10m is that there would be say 25% chance you don’t share in the jackpot and you would lose the vast bulk of that. Note that you no longer expect €13 per line as you have now vastly increased the chances of sharing albeit with yourself!
If you buy all 11 million possible lines, you definitely win at least a share of the jackpot. The pot would be about €30m as half of your over €20m spend will be taken by the NL. You would need to win outright with no sharing for it to make sense.
Boss I should warn you that you may lose on such an investment even though the odds would be tilted in your favour but much less so than for a much smaller punt.
 
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Hi Duke
That is a great summary.

So the chances of winning have not changed.

But the chances of a big win are much higher?



Brendan
 
That's right. Same number of balls. Still 6 + bonus ball drawn.
Brendan Durkan asked at the Oireachtas committee how were they going to make it a "must win", were they going to tamper with the balls? Idiot boy question. No, the game and draw stay just the same. But if not won by matching all 6 numbers they would move down the line to Match 5 + Bonus Ball (6 times easier), if that doesn't work down to Match 5 and so on.
Warning to newcomers. Your local shop will try and sell you Lotto Plus. This adds an extra €1 to each €2 line and enables you to participate in 2 additional draws run at the same time as the main Lotto. Your same numbers would participate in all 3 draws. But note that the 2 extra draws do not participate in the €19m carry forward and so your extra €1 is only worth 50c.
 
Now I know why I never buy tickets.

Bought 10 lines.

4 lines have one number.

6 lines don't have any of the 6 numbers or bonus number.

It will be a long time before I buy again.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
If only €3m of tickets are sold, will the prize fund be €21.5m ?
Click to expand...

This is where I went wrong.

It was capped at only €19m. They didn't add half the money spent today which looks as if it was over €6m.

I have an email telling me I won a prize, but I can't log on.

It's probably a scratch card.

Brendan
 
My reckoning based on 186,000 Match 3 winners which is 6 times the usual and a 50/1 shot that an incredible €20m was invested today compared with the usual €3m. With hindsight the mark up was little over 100% compared to 700% if only the usual take up occurred.
Unbelievable!

Also note there were 134,000 Match 3 winners in the Lotto Plus compared to 19,000 on Wednesday again indicating a 6 times the usual take up. Note as mentioned earlier Lotto Plus had no participation in the 19m carry forward or the must win. We also see that about 1/3rd of players know to not bother with Lotto Plus.

Based on these estimates the chances of Match 6 occurring last night were about 60% and of those 60% would be single winners, as happened.
 
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By my calculations it will take on average about 25 draws without Match 6 to get a Must Win Draw. I put that at about 3% chance so maybe 3 or 4 MWDs per year.
 
Statistically, given the c. €20m take up one would expect an average of 6 Match 5+bonus ball winners on Saturday night.
There were in fact 149 such winners.
What is so special about the draw that caused this result? Answer later.
Lotto numbers drawn:
2,9,16,30,37,40. bonus ball 23

Also reflect that if there hadn’t been that one Match 6 there would have been a share of the jackpot between these 149 Match 5 + bb winners. €169k each, a bit of a downer!
 
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There were 30,000 Match 3 winners last Wednesday
There were 186,000 Match 3 winners on Saturday
There were 12,000 Match 3 winners yesterday
50 times the number of Match 3 winners is a very accurate estimate of the number of lines participating so 100 times is an estimate of the amount spent on Lotto tickets, ignoring the Lotto Plus.
 
I thought I'd bump this thread because of this...

THE REGULATOR OF the National Lottery was alerted after one lottery player bought tens of thousands of tickets for Ireland’s biggest ever Lotto draw last year, and won money on 45,000 of the tickets.
It is not known how many tickets in total the individual bought. The cost of the 45,000 winning tickets alone would have been €180,000.
The player bought the tickets for the ‘Must be Won’ lotto jackpot in January 2022 which reached €19.6 million after many consecutive rollovers...
In total, the prizes amounted to €425,813.

One Irish Lotto player had 45,000 winning tickets in last year's highest ever 'Must be Won' draw

The company that operates the lottery investigated the prize claims because of the sheer volume before paying the player.
www.thejournal.ie
 
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