c4countdown

£60 odd million up for grabs after an unprecedented 14 rollovers!
If nobody matches all 6 numbers the £60 odd million will then be divided up among those who got 5 numbers plus the bonus ball, rather than rollover again.
But before you get too excited, the odds of getting all 6 are now roughly 45 million to 1, now that there are 59 balls in the draw, hence the number of rollovers.
Even matching 5 numbers plus the bonus ball is roughly 7.5 million to 1.
We should put together a forum syndicate and scoop the lot!

Post it as a puzzle and Graeme will work out what tomorrow's numbers will be.

A group tried to do this on the Irish lottery about fifteen or so years ago, but wasn't (?) the flaw in their plan that while they did cover all the combinations (I think it was the 13 million or so from the 1-49 model), they didn't (well, couldn't) cater for which numbers came out; as it happened, about twenty-odd random people also won, so even with the smaller prizes, the group came out really badly losing.

This may be an apocryphal story, of course.

Two tickets won over £33 million each for matching all 6 balls, however if you just missed out and only matched 5, I'm afraid your reward wasn't exactly life changing......... a poxy £1,309.

I got all six. Where do I get my money?

JimBentley wrote:A group tried to do this on the Irish lottery about fifteen or so years ago, but wasn't (?) the flaw in their plan that while they did cover all the combinations (I think it was the 13 million or so from the 1-49 model), they didn't (well, couldn't) cater for which numbers came out; as it happened, about twenty-odd random people also won, so even with the smaller prizes, the group came out really badly losing.

This may be an apocryphal story, of course.

I think this was in the very early days of the Irish national lottery. It may have been a small as six numbers from 36, i.e just under 2 million combinations. iirc there was some bonus to make that particular draw attractive (the Irish lotto used to occasionally throw an extra million of unclaimed prizes back into the prize pot at bank holidays etc). I think they only managed to cover 90-95% of numbers, got the right combo but shared the main prize and broke even or made a modest profit.

sean d wrote:

JimBentley wrote:A group tried to do this on the Irish lottery about fifteen or so years ago, but wasn't (?) the flaw in their plan that while they did cover all the combinations (I think it was the 13 million or so from the 1-49 model), they didn't (well, couldn't) cater for which numbers came out; as it happened, about twenty-odd random people also won, so even with the smaller prizes, the group came out really badly losing.

This may be an apocryphal story, of course.

I think this was in the very early days of the Irish national lottery. It may have been a small as six numbers from 36, i.e just under 2 million combinations. iirc there was some bonus to make that particular draw attractive (the Irish lotto used to occasionally throw an extra million of unclaimed prizes back into the prize pot at bank holidays etc). I think they only managed to cover 90-95% of numbers, got the right combo but shared the main prize and broke even or made a modest profit.

Cheers sean, that sounds much more plausible than what my (unreliable) memory remembered.

Now the UK lottery has been expanded to 59 numbers and also has a rule that it must be won once it goes over a £50 million jackpot, does that mean that such a cartel would be impossible? I can't work out if it would or wouldn't.

JimBentley wrote:

sean d wrote:

JimBentley wrote:A group tried to do this on the Irish lottery about fifteen or so years ago, but wasn't (?) the flaw in their plan that while they did cover all the combinations (I think it was the 13 million or so from the 1-49 model), they didn't (well, couldn't) cater for which numbers came out; as it happened, about twenty-odd random people also won, so even with the smaller prizes, the group came out really badly losing.

This may be an apocryphal story, of course.

I think this was in the very early days of the Irish national lottery. It may have been a small as six numbers from 36, i.e just under 2 million combinations. iirc there was some bonus to make that particular draw attractive (the Irish lotto used to occasionally throw an extra million of unclaimed prizes back into the prize pot at bank holidays etc). I think they only managed to cover 90-95% of numbers, got the right combo but shared the main prize and broke even or made a modest profit.

Cheers sean, that sounds much more plausible than what my (unreliable) memory remembered.

Now the UK lottery has been expanded to 59 numbers and also has a rule that it must be won once it goes over a £50 million jackpot, does that mean that such a cartel would be impossible? I can't work out if it would or wouldn't.

Not impossible, but quite a risk that you'd be sharing the prize. For a big draw as per the one the other week, there's maybe £75million in prizes available, and it costs about £45M to cover every combination. I'll leave it for you to look up, but if 1/3 of all combinations are covered, expectation is that you'd win alone 2/3 of the time = £50M expected win. However, the risk of more than one other person sharing likely drags that amount close to break-even, not considering how other prize amounts react. So, I'll leave proper analysis to a real statto, but I reckon that it's too marginal to be worth the bother.

Ian Volante wrote: and it costs about £45M to cover every combination.

Nope, £2 a line now.

Jon Corby wrote:

Ian Volante wrote: and it costs about £45M to cover every combination.

Nope, £2 a line now.

Oh yeah. It's fucked then.

The owner of the second £33 million winning ticket has come forward, but there might be a problem.................
The ticket has had a spin in her washing machine courtesy of the pocket of her jeans and now the date and barcode on the ticket are illegible, although the winning numbers are perfectly legible.........funny that.

Looking forward to Steven's take on last night's prizes...

So for defying odds of 144,414/1 your reward for matching 5 balls last night was an incredible....................£15.
The "Lucky" numbers were 7,14,21,35,41,42, Bonus Ball 43.
Can you imagine if 28 had come out instead of 41....players that had matched 5 would have been seriously struggling to get their £2 back!

Steven M. McCann wrote:So for defying odds of 144,414/1 your reward for matching 5 balls last night was an incredible....................£15.
The "Lucky" numbers were 7,14,21,35,41,42, Bonus Ball 43.
Can you imagine if 28 had come out instead of 41....players that had matched 5 would have been seriously struggling to get their £2 back!

I think the bigger story would have been the people matching all the balls and getting less than ten grand each, which I don't think has happened for quite a while.

If we're assuming that nearly all of the match 5's had 7,14,21,28,35,42, does it seem really odd to anybody else that there were 6 matching the bonus ball of 43, and none matching 41 for the main 6? I know they could have lost any of the 6 balls for their 43, but then there's no logic to why there were so many match 5's.... is there?

Jon Corby wrote:If we're assuming that nearly all of the match 5's had 7,14,21,28,35,42, does it seem really odd to anybody else that there were 6 matching the bonus ball of 43, and none matching 41 for the main 6? I know they could have lost any of the 6 balls for their 43, but then there's no logic to why there were so many match 5's.... is there?

I think that if you just picked a line of numbers across the entry sheet, you'd pick a sequence of numbers going up in sevens.

Ian Volante wrote:

Jon Corby wrote:If we're assuming that nearly all of the match 5's had 7,14,21,28,35,42, does it seem really odd to anybody else that there were 6 matching the bonus ball of 43, and none matching 41 for the main 6? I know they could have lost any of the 6 balls for their 43, but then there's no logic to why there were so many match 5's.... is there?

I think that if you just picked a line of numbers across the entry sheet, you'd pick a sequence of numbers going up in sevens.

Yeah, I know, my point is that the 6 x match5+bonus looks like a bit of an anomaly, considering the bonus wasn't a multiple of 7. If we're assuming that the thousands of match 5s were 7,14,21,28,35,42, why did 6 people also match 43 but not 41?

Jon Corby wrote:

Ian Volante wrote:

Jon Corby wrote:If we're assuming that nearly all of the match 5's had 7,14,21,28,35,42, does it seem really odd to anybody else that there were 6 matching the bonus ball of 43, and none matching 41 for the main 6? I know they could have lost any of the 6 balls for their 43, but then there's no logic to why there were so many match 5's.... is there?

I think that if you just picked a line of numbers across the entry sheet, you'd pick a sequence of numbers going up in sevens.

Yeah, I know, my point is that the 6 x match5+bonus looks like a bit of an anomaly, considering the bonus wasn't a multiple of 7. If we're assuming that the thousands of match 5s were 7,14,21,28,35,42, why did 6 people also match 43 but not 41?

Ah I see, I thought you'd moved on from that point! Maybe people are more likely to go down at the end of the line rather than up?

I just came across this article on the general subject.

Jon Corby wrote:If we're assuming that nearly all of the match 5's had 7,14,21,28,35,42, does it seem really odd to anybody else that there were 6 matching the bonus ball of 43, and none matching 41 for the main 6? I know they could have lost any of the 6 balls for their 43, but then there's no logic to why there were so many match 5's.... is there?

Jon Corby wrote:Yeah, I know, my point is that the 6 x match5+bonus looks like a bit of an anomaly, considering the bonus wasn't a multiple of 7. If we're assuming that the thousands of match 5s were 7,14,21,28,35,42, why did 6 people also match 43 but not 41?

I don't think it's that unlikely. There were so many match 5s because people went for 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility that some people (a minority) had five of these six and one other. Also, some people might have had 41, 42, 43 and three others that happened to be multiples of 7.