Two Lottery Wins
Two lottery wins every year. No, it’s not a guarantee or a promise – just an aspiration that I’ve been thinking about recently. And I’ve concluded that it’s perfectly possible if a player is willing to bet on the law of averages.
My idea is simple: Find out what the odds of you winning any prize are in the lottery that you play, then decide to play enough tickets each year to produce two wins if the odds hold true.
For example, the odds of winning any prize in the UK Lotto game are around 1 in 54. We would therefore need to play 108 tickets per year to stand a reasonably chance of winning two prizes. The easiest way of doing this would be to play two tickets each week (52 x 2 = 104) and buy a couple of extra tickets on your birthday and over the Christmas period.
Of course, there is no certainty that the odds will hold true at all, but playing the lottery with a fairly realistic expectation of winning twice during the coming year is something that appeals to me.
A variation on this approach would be to aim a bit higher than simply going for “any prize”. This would involve buying a lot more tickets, but can still be workable.
For example, if you wanted to stand a reasonable chance of winning two four-number prizes in a given year, you would need to buy 2,066 tickets, because the odds of winning one four-number prize are 1 in 1,033. 2,066 tickets sounds like a lot, but when you divide it by 52 weeks, it’s less than 40 tickets per week. If you set up a syndicate which has ten members, each member would pay just £4 a week to adopt this approach. When you break things down like that, playing a couple of thousand tickets a year seems very doable.
Cynics will argue that two four-number wins in a year isn’t enough to cover the purchase of 2,066 tickets, and I agree. What the cynics need to remember is that any of those tickets could match five numbers, five numbers and the bonus ball or all six numbers for a multi-million pound jackpot. And because the odds of winning any prize are around 1 in 54, playing 2,066 tickets could result in 38 wins over the course of a year if the law of averages decides to play ball.
I don’t know about you, but I now have a renewed sense of enthusiasm when I think about playing the lottery in 2008...
Article Last Updated: 27/12/2007 08:52:57
