From: "Nebulous" 
Newsgroups: uk.finance
Subject: Re: National Lotto
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 12:49:21 -0000


"mo"  wrote in message
news:756dnZ6kKegZ7X3cRVnyhw@giganews.com...
>
> "Jonathan Bryce"  wrote in message
> news:ck16b2-8n3.ln1@michelle.jbryce...
> > Individual wrote:
> >
> >> Does anyone else think that the Lotto is a fix?
> >>
> >> I've been playing on & off since it started and I've only won a total
of
> >> £50!
> >
> > It's not a fix, just that the chances of winning are pretty minimal.
> >
> > The odds of winning the jackpot are, I believe, in the region of
> > 14,000,000:1, so if you bought one ticket each week, you would need to
> > play
> > on average for about 270,000 years before winning.
>
> and if you didnt buy the winning ticket on the week it comes up.....
>
> if there are 14m different combinations and the rollover is 22m (and you
> have 14m to spare) you could just buy every combination and hope u win the
> lot (i.e dont have to share)
>

Thats taking a real chance though. Psychology really enters into this, as
some numbers are more popular than others. That accounted for the higher
than expected number of rollovers when the lottery first started.  For
instance I remember reading that over 10,000 people chose 1,2,3,4,5,6 every
week. So fancy spending £14 million and splitting £22 million with 10,000
other people?

The introduction of lucky dips has evened this out to some extent, as they
do not favour certain numbers in the way people do.

There were a lot of lottery related threads on this group in the early days
of the lottery. I'm sure they would still be available on google groups.

Neb