Dream Number Value

Dream Number may be popular with some lottery players, but I personally avoid playing it as a matter of course simply because the prizes it offers are so unfavourable. For those of you who haven’t really looked into the Dream Number rules, it’s a fixed prize game which requires the player to match anything from 1 to 7 digits in the correct order to win a prize. To win the jackpot, all 7 digits must be matched in order, and the chances of you achieving this are just 1 in 10,000,000. If you overcome these odds, your prize is... wait for it... £500,000.

Now I have no problem with the figure of £500,000 per se. It’s a sum that I think most people would be quite happy to have deposited into their bank account, and it’s big enough to fund some pretty huge life improvements. But when £500,000 is offered as a prize for beating odds of 1 in 10 million I think it’s something of an insult. Unfortunately, the prizes aren’t any more generous at the lower levels. For example, your odds of matching the first two Dream Number digits in order are 1 in 11.2, and your prize for achieving this is just £2.

If a bookmaker asked you to pick the winner of an eleven runner horse race (where all of the horses had an equal chance of winning) and he offered you £2 to a £1 stake if you were successful, the chances are that you would tell him to take a hike, and quite rightly. Even if you won according to the law of averages, you would win once in every eleven bets. This means you would get back £2 after staking £11, giving you a loss of £9 despite winning exactly as often as the odds suggest you should.

If the same jackpot to odds prize that Dream Number offers were offered by Lotto, where your chances of success are 1 in 13,983,816, the jackpot would be fixed at around £699,191. Were this the case, I think that very few people would choose to play Lotto. Whilst we all know that the organisers need to make a profit and set aside some cash for good causes, offering such paltry Dream Number prizes in relation to the odds of winning them is, in my opinion, tantamount to daylight robbery.

The good news is that nobody forces us to play lottery games. We can and should investigate the prizes paid and then decide, bearing in mind the odds of winning, whether or not we want to participate. If enough of us do this, and we avoid the games that seem particularly unfair to players, our refusal to be ripped off may eventually encourage someone to revise the rules to make them at least a little less insulting.

Article Last Updated: 08/01/2008 10:37:40

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