UK National Lottery

[Mythopoeika]

I (MA-level trained statistician) have discussed this interesting belief with Escet (particle physics PhD, top CERN Higgs boson analyst) and A.N. Other.

We tried hard to explain to A.N. Other that numbers show up on the dice or lottery purely by chance and that whatever numbers come up later are not influenced by them. There are no patterns.

A.N. Other insisted that there are indeed patterns and that by carefully studying the distributions of previous numbers one could predict which would be lucky in future.

Escet and I fell about laughing and challenged him to win next week's lottery.

As far as we know, he's still at work.

LOL

 

[Ermintruder]

One of the curiousities is that certain numbers appear to be drawn significantly slightly more than others. I don't have the time to properly do means/modes/median plots on these:

https://www.lottery.co.uk/lotto/statistics

....but it's intriguing to note the following officially-reported stats:

13 is, appropriately-enough, the unluckiest ball, having only been drawn 226 times. The gestalt power of collaborative aversion?

40 is the 'luckiest' ball, 291 times it's been selected by the random hand of whatever.

(That medians-out (?) to 258.5 times....)

Ultimately, say after 10,000 draws, they should all tend towards having been out 10,000 times.

Interesting to speculate whether after all that time, 13 was still unlucky.

Also, informative to note that amongst the ten extra balls which they've recently-added so as to enhance our experience, there's some crazy effects due the relatively-smaller sample size: balls 50, 53 and 56 have only been out, modally, just eight times. Yet the amazeball 57 has been out sixteen times. Mr Heinz would approve....

I'm now going to play the lottery this week, based upon selecting 40 as a number, plus the three other luckiest numbers (including newbie 57) then select the balance from the unluckiest numbers, and finally I'll sacrifice a (Kentucky Fried) Chicken to the gods

(What you do is go to the drive-through, order, pay, then when you're waiting at the service window, floor the accelerator and speed off minus your chicken. Works great. Or at least it's helping me to lose weight).

And if I win an amazing sum of money, I'll buy you all a drink. Of course, you can all try my untried formula, and we could share in the winnings. So I'd better delete this post, in case too many people apply my pseudo-scientific ramblings, and erode my dividend (which could be painful)

 

[escargot]

Or just take Lucky Dips. Same chance of winning.

 

[Cochise]

One of the curiousities is that certain numbers appear to be drawn significantly slightly more than others. I don't have the time to properly do means/modes/median plots on these:

https://www.lottery.co.uk/lotto/statistics

....but it's intriguing to note the following officially-reported stats:

13 is, appropriately-enough, the unluckiest ball, having only been drawn 226 times. The gestalt power of collaborative aversion?

40 is the 'luckiest' ball, 291 times it's been selected by the random hand of whatever.

(That medians-out (?) to 258.5 times....)

Ultimately, say after 10,000 draws, they should all tend towards having been out 10,000 times.

Interesting to speculate whether after all that time, 13 was still unlucky.

Also, informative to note that amongst the ten extra balls which they've recently-added so as to enhance our experience, there's some crazy effects due the relatively-smaller sample size: balls 50, 53 and 56 have only been out, modally, just eight times. Yet the amazeball 57 has been out sixteen times. Mr Heinz would approve....

I'm now going to play the lottery this week, based upon selecting 40 as a number, plus the three other luckiest numbers (including newbie 57) then select the balance from the unluckiest numbers, and finally I'll sacrifice a (Kentucky Fried) Chicken to the gods

(What you do is go to the drive-through, order, pay, then when you're waiting at the service window, floor the accelerator and speed off minus your chicken. Works great. Or at least it's helping me to lose weight).

And if I win an amazing sum of money, I'll buy you all a drink. Of course, you can all try my untried formula, and we could share in the winnings. So I'd better delete this post, in case too many people apply my pseudo-scientific ramblings, and erode my dividend (which could be painful)

I think it is studying things like that that sends people crazy about patterns. (Not suggesting it has done that to you, Ermintrude).

The law of averages doesn't work in such a case (assuming all the machinery is working perfectly as intended). Just because 13 has been drawn less in the past doesn't mean there is some compelling force that has to make it catch up.

 

[escargot]

Yup, there do appear to be patterns but they are always seen retrospectively. They cannot be used to predict future results. This is because the apparent patterns are spurious.

Looking at past patterns of frequency of numbers coming up is like looking at clouds and seeing dragons and birds. You're putting the dragons and birds there because you want to see them: their appearance is subjective and random.

Aha, one hears, what about the lottery balls which are heavier and so move downhill faster because they have more paint? They have a chance of coming out first!

Yeah.

 

[Peripart]

This list of comparative odds is unremittingly North American, and (like 76.5% of statistics) probably all made-up...


Killed by fireworks- 1 in 616,488

Winning an Olympic Gold medal- 1 in 662,000.

Crushed by a meteor- 1 in 700,000.

Struck by lightning- 1 in 2,300,000.

Dying from food poisoning- 1 in 3,000,000.

Attacked by a shark- 1 in 11,500,000.

Becoming an astronaut- 1 in 12,100,000.

Lowest calculated odds for predicting the march Madness bracket perfectly- 1 in 128 billion.

I'm quoting some of these examples selectively, to make a point about how statistics is really poorly reported in the press. Before the number of balls in the UK lotto increased, there were 49, and the chance of winning the big prize was a little under 1 in 14 million. Figures such as the one above were then produced to "prove" that you are, say, 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to win the UK lottery.

This is, of course, total bollocks.

The figure for lightning strikes is measured over a lifetime, but the lottery odds are per ticket bought (actually, per line, but allow me some simplification!). Therefore, you only have to buy more than 6 lottery tickets to mean you are more likely to win than you are to get electrocuted by God. Buy a ticket for every draw, twice a week for 20 years (the rough time that the Lotto has been going - that's 2000 separate draws), and you improve your chances of winning the jackpot from 1 in 14 million to something nearer 1 in 7000. OK, it's slightly worse than that, since the number of balls has increased in the last couple of years, but it's in that order of magnitude.

Therefore, consider the supposedly infinitesimal odds of the same person or syndicate winning big more than once. Well, the lottery in the UK has apparently created 3700 millionaires since it started (individuals and syndicates both treated as one "winner" for the purposes of this argument). Their chance of winning once does not alter their odds of winning again, so we have a group of 3700 people, each of whom have a 1 in 7000 chance of winning a jackpot over a 20-year period. My (simplified, and with certain assumptions) maths suggests that the chances of one of these people winning a second big prize is therefore roughly 1 in 2 over 20 years. And not 1 in several hundred billion.

 

[escargot]

So why am I still broke?

 

[Peripart]

So why am I still broke?

Because you and I are both in the "other" 6999 out of 7000...

 

[Ermintruder]

Well, the UK National Lottery stops tonight at midnight: Camelot (the operators, on behalf of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board) are no longer to run it, after 30 yrs of responsibility.

Tomorrow, the UK National Lottery is reborn, courtesy of Allwyn.

The Arthurian ball-bouncing millionaire-making machines (Merlin, Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, Vyvyan & Galahad) will presumably be dispatched to Valhalla along with Alan Dedicot and various other wraith-like thoughtforms that have inhabited the surreal pantheon of British evening tv light entertainment.

This has seen a supporting cast of many hundreds, such as Noelbeard of the Edmonds, Dale 'Super' Winton, Sir Terry of the TOGs, Mystic 'I see now through the mists' Meg, Barry(more & BG varieties, plus John Barrowman), Bobsmarm Monkhouse, light dustings of reprogrammed Spice Girls, and a disconsonant range of other faded media and celebrity impersonalities.

This represents the end of an era of (usually) unfulfilled wishfulness, and the beginning of some sort of new epoch of vapid hope. No longer (we can presume) will we be told we've to be in it to win it, or 'It could be you'

We always knew we were never going to win, and we were right: but tomorrow is another twenty-first century day, wherein we can still pretend anything is possible.

 

[Kondoru]

Was there something rational in there?

 

[Ermintruder]

Was there something rational in there?

Yes, but the contents may not travel very well outwith the c20th+ century borders of the United Kingdom & The Isle of Man (especially into North America).

It would need to be translated by PBS, and turned into a Sunday miniseries, with Tom Hanks as 'The Voice Of The Balls', and Oprah playing the part of Terry Wogan.

 

[oxo66]

Well, the UK National Lottery stops tonight at midnight: Camelot (the operators, on behalf of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board) are no longer to run it, after 30 yrs of responsibility.

Tomorrow, the UK National Lottery is reborn, courtesy of Allwyn.

following that second link says Allwyn bought Camelot off the Ontario Teachers in early 2023, after winning the franchise (in 2022). They are already running the old lottery but now, as you say, they get to rebrand and reinvent it.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

My kid (early 20s) keeps doing elaborate football accumulators and only losing them by one thing. Seems to happen to him repeatedly. Last week, there was a whole list of football things that had to happen and they all had and he was, yet again, waiting on the very last one - some obscure player to be yellow carded or score and with still a bit of game left, player was subbed off. The odds seem long for anyone to get many of the elements go their way (he's also won a few of these) but more often than you'd imagine, if his accumulator has to do 10 things, he'll get 9...

 

[Yithian]

My kid (early 20s) keeps doing elaborate football accumulators and only losing them by one thing. Seems to happen to him repeatedly. Last week, there was a whole list of football things that had to happen and they all had and he was, yet again, waiting on the very last one - some obscure player to be yellow carded or score and with still a bit of game left, player was subbed off. The odds seem long for anyone to get many of the elements go their way (he's also won a few of these) but more often than you'd imagine, if his accumulator has to do 10 things, he'll get 9...

But what do you think would happen if he started attempting nine-step-accumulators?

 

[escargot]

My kid (early 20s) keeps doing elaborate football accumulators and only losing them by one thing. Seems to happen to him repeatedly. Last week, there was a whole list of football things that had to happen and they all had and he was, yet again, waiting on the very last one - some obscure player to be yellow carded or score and with still a bit of game left, player was subbed off. The odds seem long for anyone to get many of the elements go their way (he's also won a few of these) but more often than you'd imagine, if his accumulator has to do 10 things, he'll get 9...

That's why betting is a mug's game.

 

[maximus otter]

That's why betting is a mug's game.

lndeed. My dad had the financial common sense of a stickleback, but even he used to quote a saying from his childhood: “The only safe way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.”

maximus otter

 

[Robbrent]

I'm quoting some of these examples selectively, to make a point about how statistics is really poorly reported in the press. Before the number of balls in the UK lotto increased, there were 49, and the chance of winning the big prize was a little under 1 in 14 million. Figures such as the one above were then produced to "prove" that you are, say, 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to win the UK lottery.

This is, of course, total bollocks.

The figure for lightning strikes is measured over a lifetime, but the lottery odds are per ticket bought (actually, per line, but allow me some simplification!). Therefore, you only have to buy more than 6 lottery tickets to mean you are more likely to win than you are to get electrocuted by God. Buy a ticket for every draw, twice a week for 20 years (the rough time that the Lotto has been going - that's 2000 separate draws), and you improve your chances of winning the jackpot from 1 in 14 million to something nearer 1 in 7000. OK, it's slightly worse than that, since the number of balls has increased in the last couple of years, but it's in that order of magnitude.

Therefore, consider the supposedly infinitesimal odds of the same person or syndicate winning big more than once. Well, the lottery in the UK has apparently created 3700 millionaires since it started (individuals and syndicates both treated as one "winner" for the purposes of this argument). Their chance of winning once does not alter their odds of winning again, so we have a group of 3700 people, each of whom have a 1 in 7000 chance of winning a jackpot over a 20-year period. My (simplified, and with certain assumptions) maths suggests that the chances of one of these people winning a second big prize is therefore roughly 1 in 2 over 20 years. And not 1 in several hundred billion.

I like the logic of this argument

 

[Yithian]

That's why betting is a mug's game.

While I agree that regularly gambling significant slices of your income is indeed very foolish, I've been to the casino once, bet on two horse races in my life, and played cards socially for (comparatively modest sums of) money a fair few times, and I've enjoyed all of it. I was given a ticket for thr first National Lottery draw and won (I think!) £10.

It was all money I could afford to lose—and the betting was only one strand of a social experience.

No harm here, surely?

I'd say the same about social drinking and alcoholism.

 

[Peripart]

... a supporting cast of many hundreds, such as Noelbeard of the Edmonds, Dale 'Super' Winton, Sir Terry of the TOGs, Mystic 'I see now through the mists' Meg, Barry(more & BG varieties, plus John Barrowman), Bobsmarm Monkhouse, light dustings of reprogrammed Spice Girls, and a disconsonant range of other faded media and celebrity impersonalities.

That seems to suggest that presenting the Lottery show is bad for your health. A good proportion of those named above have carked it.

 

[escargot]

While I agree that regularly gambling significant slices of your income is indeed very foolish, I've been to the casino once, bet on two horse races in my life, and played cards socially for (comparatively modest sums of) money a fair few times, and I've enjoyed all of it. I was given a ticket for thr first National Lottery draw and won (I think!) £10.

It was all money I could afford to lose—and the betting was only one strand of a social experience.

No harm here, surely?

I'd say the same about social drinking and alcoholism.

Not everything is about you.

Gambling problems cause huge misery for people who can't stop at will like you did.

 

[Yithian]

Not everything is about you.

Why be mean when you reply?

I only use myself as an example as the best-known person to me, but the logic applies to many others.

I completely agree that gambling is a bad for some people.

 

[escargot]

Why be mean when you reply?

I only use myself as an example as the best-known person to me, but the logic applies to many others.

I completely agree that gambling is a bad for some people.

It's bad for lots of people. For some it's a lifelong addiction.

If you're going to use your own experience as an example, you might mention that this is how you went about it or that you are only speaking for yourself. Otherwise it sounds smug.

 

[AnonyJ]

Are there any folks here with good skills re. data/maths/probabilities please?

I know paying £2 for the current 59 number main Lotto draws give one very small odds of winning (45m -1). I stopped buying tickets about 20 years ago when the odds were slightly better (7.5m-1).

My interest was piqued the Omaze house/car/money raffles. eg., https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand...what-it-is-really-like-to-win-a-3m-dream-home

One can pay £10 a month for 30 entries or £10 one-off for blocks of 15 entries; the main prize is normally worth around £3,000,000 and limited to UK adult entries, drawn (IIRC about every 6 weeks). Back of a ciggy packet sums, according to my own peculiar system below might give odds of:

UK adults - 45,000,000 (roughly)
Say (generously) 25% of them play = 11,250,000
If all of them subscribe = 337,500,000 entries

Some entrants might just buy 10 entries, some might buy 1,000 or more.

And this is where I get schtuck! My brain tells me the odds are (generously) less than 10,000,000 ish to one?

I 'get' probabilities (and in the Deal Or No Deal scenario can work them out after each move) but it's the maths that bogs me down. Any rough calculations are welcomed

I am 90% sure the odds of winning a £3,000,000 prize are better that the national Lotto but that is just my thinking!

 

[Analogue Boy]

I work on the principle of ‘you’re more likely to get hit by a meteorite than winning the lottery’, so I buy two tickets because the chances of being hit by two meteorites against a lottery win are more in my favour.

 

[kamalktk]

The big conspiracy is I havnt won it yet.

/the fact I'm not even British shows just how deep the conspiracy goes!

 

[kamalktk]

I work on the principle of ‘you’re more likely to get hit by a meteorite than winning the lottery’, so I buy two tickets because the chances of being hit by two meteorites against a lottery win are more in my favour.

You talking giraffe sized meteorites or washing machine sized?

 

[escargot]

A colleague won a big (BIG) lottery prize in December. He did of course leave work immediately, stopping by only to drop off his written resignation.

We're covering our bitterness with expressions like 'Well, it's nice for it to happen to someone you know!' and 'Just shows, it could be anyone!'

I think we're doing a good job as nobody's actually broken down yet.

 

[Tunn11]

I work on the principle of ‘you’re more likely to get hit by a meteorite than winning the lottery’, so I buy two tickets because the chances of being hit by two meteorites against a lottery win are more in my favour.

Many smaller solar system bodies are actually binaries. If this applies to meteorite sized bodies that may alter your odds.

 

[escargot]

Shall we Brits have a go n t'Euromillions tonight?

We could ask our more psychic posters to suggest numbers.

I might have to bow out of any active collaboration though as my career as a gambler is woefully unremunerative.

 

[Zographos]

Shall we Brits have a go n t'Euromillions tonight?

We could ask our more psychic posters to suggest numbers.

I might have to bow out of any active collaboration though as my career as a gambler is woefully unremunerative.

It always amazes me how more psychics aren't millionaires by this stage. Of course they're not interested in money...