Oh No! It's Another Lottery Probability Question

nheather

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It's a moot question because there is no way that I would do it but .......

Just spent another£10 on tickets for the EuroMillions draw. I only do this when the jackpot gets silly big otherwise I don't gamble at all.

But it occurred to me that this was the third draw in a row that I had spent £10 and asked myself "what if it ran for ten draws before it was won" and I concluded that I would spend the lots of £10 (£100 in total) - I wouldn't chicken out before it was won.

I realised that in that time the jackpot has risen for £91M to £112M a significant increase but I would have been over the moon had I won the £91M.

This spurned my question

Would my chances of winning have been better is
  1. Spent the whole £100 for 40 tickets on the first draw
  2. Spent £10 for 4 tickets in each of the ten draws
  3. Makes no difference, its the same
Ignore the fact that a later win would mean more money - assume the jackpots are all so big they are effectively the same amount.

And ignore the fact that we don't know how long it will run for before it is won.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Not a clue but id settle for just the raffle prize tbh, if I did win the big one I would probably use most of it helping others out.

Can easily live off 1mil for the rest of my life even if I was lucky enough to find someone to settle down with.

I just buy 1 ticket myself, if I am supposed to win I will win and you have 0 chance if you don't buy at least one.
 
Wasted yer money as I plan to win it only spending £2.50[emoji16][emoji16]
 
I'd rather there be many £2-5 million prizes than one £113 million prize.
 
Homework: Which gives you more chance of winning - buying all the tickets in one week, or one ticket a week for 100 million weeks? What are the expected payoffs?

Or

Does adding a second ticket to a draw increase your chances more, less or the same as buying one ticket in a different draw?
 
This spurned my question

Would my chances of winning have been better is
  1. Spent the whole £100 for 40 tickets on the first draw
  2. Spent £10 for 4 tickets in each of the ten draws
  3. Makes no difference, its the same
Most likely 1) Spent the whole £100 for 40 tickets on the first draw

For ease of typing let's say that there are 1 million different combinations you can get with the Euromillions balls (it's actually 116,531,800 combinations).

Scenario one - you would buy 40 different tickets, so you have 40 combinations out of 1m, of having the winning combination.

Scenario two - you would have 4 combinations out of 1m, of having the winning numbers. Whether you play the same 4 tickets or choose 4 different combinations in the subsequent 9 weeks you will always have 4 combinations out of 1m. ie each of the 10 weeks would have the same odds.

Scenario one is minuscully better odds, but still astronomically small.
 
It depends on what you count as a 'win'. If you mean at least the minimum jackpot, then it won't make any difference how you spend the £100. Each bet has the same odds of winning, no matter how it's spent.

If you mean winning the £100m+ rollover jackpot, then you're better off spending it all at once. If you spend it as £10 bets over 10 weeks, then somebody else might win it before you. Also, the greater the jackpot, the more people tempted to bet (like you), thus potentially diluting your share.
 
I'd imagine it's much of a muchness, if every ticket has its own odds time wouldn't make any difference.
 
Every singular ticket has its own odds be it 1 in a 1000000 I think it's a lot more tbh. Time doesn't factor in to this they have the same odds if bought as one or bought over a period of time.
 
Time is the zero factor here it doesn't count for nowt.


Sorry option 3.
 
Every singular ticket has its own odds be it 1 in a 1000000 I think it's a lot more tbh. Time doesn't factor in to this they have the same odds if bought as one or bought over a period of time.
But you have 40 chances out of 1000000 if you go 'all in' on the 1st draw.

If you do £10 only on 10 draws. In each of those draws you only have 4 chances of winning. As none of these draws have any effect on any subsequent draw, you always have had 4 chances out of 1000000 on each draw.
 
That's the point I'm making option 3 lol.
 
That's the point I'm making option 3 lol.
But your odds of winning are 40 out of 1000000 if you go 'all in' on one draw, so that is better odds than 4 out of 1000000.
 
If you're going for the big jackpot, I assume that your chances would be marginally better if you bought all the tickets for a single draw.

If you boil it down to a scenario of rolling a dice.

You're allowed 10 attempts at rolling a 6.

You can either roll the dice 10 times and hope to get the 6, or you can sit in a circle with 4 of your mates and take consecutive turns until somebody wins.

I know which option I'd go for.
 
If one of them was a fixed number instead of rgn it would be better odds to put 40 on the first draw.
 
I'd rather there be many £2-5 million prizes than one £113 million prize.

Apparently not even £150mil+ is enough, did you hear about the guy that won and then was spotted after buying a lottery ticket, I mean seriously, you are set for life.
 
If one of them was a fixed number instead of rgn it would be better odds to put 40 on the first draw.
In fact I've argued my own argument, option 1 is the clear winner.
 
Oh no it isn't...
 
It's all immaterial anyway. I just managed to get in with minutes to go to put a cheeky tenner on. One of the lines has the winning numbers, or at least that's what Jeremy Corbyn told me.
 
I've mentioned this before but the guy at our work who won the jackpot purchased a single lucky dip and that was enough to be the solo winner that week.
 
It's all immaterial anyway. I just managed to get in with minutes to go to put a cheeky tenner on. One of the lines has the winning numbers, or at least that's what Jeremy Corbyn told me.
Nonsense. Dianne Abbott told me the winning numbers, & frankly I trust that Diane has a better grasp of the numbers than Corbyn!

:p;)
 

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