Euromillions

[L CC]

I don't do it, despite being both stupid and desperate.
Partly because I understand probability, and partly because I'd rather have 3 or 4 bars or chocolate....

[red marley]

Reminds me of suicide lottery: you write down your numbers and then watch the results - but without buying a ticked.

Anything but suicide. I've been doing that since the UK lottery began. Each Saturday, I don't buy a ticket with the numbers 1-6. I'm hundreds of pounds up on the deal so far. That is of course exactly what Camelot do every week on a massive scale, and they too seem to be up on the deal.

In a tenuous link back to cycling matters, I do the same with bicycle insurance. By not insuring my bikes over the last decade (and not getting them nicked), I've saved more in not paying the premiums than the value of the bikes themselves.

[Jaded]

I've made a note of all your replies to this thread. When I win on Friday I shall only gift money to those who believe in the Lottery. 

[Ray 6701]

I've made a note of all your replies to this thread. When I win on Friday I shall only gift money to those who believe in the Lottery. 

I believe 

[Sergeant Pluck]

It's a tax on the mathematically challenged.

Yebbut if you're not in, you can't win 

The bit that gets me is that even though I know the chance of winning is 1:76,000,000 odd, I still think getting 2 tickets is a good idea  for big jackpots. Only 1:38,000,000 then 

[Regulator]

I've made a note of all your replies to this thread. When I win on Friday I shall only gift money to those who believe in the Lottery. 

Unfortunately for you, it is my turn to win it this week. 

[Wowbagger]

I just heard on the news that Greece has sunk its entire GDP into lottery tickets.

[Jaded]

I just heard on the news that Greece has sunk its entire GDP into lottery tickets.

They've bought 2 tickets?

[CommuteTooFar]

I once explained the foolishness of gambling to a friend who always played a one arm bandit in the cafe we met in.  So I stick 10p into the slot pushed the button and said "See now I am 10p poorer." At which point the  wheels stopped and the bandit paid out its £20 jackpot.

[Bledlow]

In a tenuous link back to cycling matters, I do the same with bicycle insurance. By not insuring my bikes over the last decade (and not getting them nicked), I've saved more in not paying the premiums than the value of the bikes themselves.

Me too!

We are both demonstrating our understanding of the purpose of insurance. It is for those expenses which you do not expect to incur, but which would cause financial embarrassment if they ever become necessary. Having your house burn down is a good example. Insuring things which cost a days or weeks pay is just a way of giving money to an insurance company. A months pay? Maybe . . . .

Unfortunately, insurers don't offer the right sort of insurance for my taste. I'd like to be able to buy "get me home & pay all the medical costs & any liabilities incurred in a real emergency" travel insurance, for example, & pay about threepence for it, based on the very low risk of it ever having to pay out, but I'm lumbered with premiums calculated to cover all the petty little claims.

[woollypigs]

And some of your £2 will go to cover great design like the dome

[hatler]

A friend had a winning Euromillions lottery ticket on the occasion of the last mega-jackpot. Apparently there were only 37 'better' tickets across the whole of Europe.

He won £80.  Not quite as much as he was expecting.

I think he muttered something about if he'd gone in to a bookies and made the same bet his £2 would have returned tens of thousands.

Which begs the question, do bookies offer their own odds on the lottery draws ?

[Kathy]

When you buy a lottery ticket, you're not buying a chance of winning the lottery: you're buying a dream. My MIL has occasionally had to advise extremely poor people - people who have to choose between feeding or clothing their children. When looking at their weekly outgoings, there's often a lottery ticket or two in there. She used to try and persuade them to give it up, but after hearing too many people call it their "only hope" she stopped. People need to dream. People need to hope, otherwise they've got nothing.

Personally, I don't buy lottery tickets, but then my life isn't yet a crushing pit of despair.

[andygates]

I once explained the foolishness of gambling to a friend who always played a one arm bandit in the cafe we met in.  So I stick 10p into the slot pushed the button and said "See now I am 10p poorer." At which point the  wheels stopped and the bandit paid out its £20 jackpot.

Silly!  Those things have programmed payouts - they're only slightly random.  Find a "sevens" machine that's been feasting and it will be coming close to mandatory pay-out.  When you get a tiny pay with a nudge option to a bigger pay, DON'T nudge, and a couple of spins later it goes well into pay mode. 

(unless they've updated the firmware since '90)

Point is, there's enough non-randomness that they can be gamed; there's also enough randomness that often the gamers still blow it, feeding it past its payout mode (which tails off erratically) into the gobble phase again. 

Lotteries, they're just maths.

[redshift]

Personally, I don't buy lottery tickets, but then my life isn't yet a crushing pit of despair.

Oh, give it time.  You're only young yet...   

[Basil]

So, he said, thinking about buying his second ever lottery ticket, do you guys choose your own numbers?  Thereby ending up blaming yourselves for getting it wrong.  Or do you do that lucky dip thing and then blame the machine?

[Andrew Br]

I'm glad I had bike insurance and I'll cover my new bike when it arrives.
And I've got a lottery ticket for tomorrow 

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Lottery / probability rant alert...

I think that is a misunderstanding of the probabilities involved here. For a single person buying a single ticket with those odds, the likelihood of winning is 0, nada, zilch, rien, impossible.

OK, the probability of hitting the jackpot is actually 0.000000013. But since when do we normally concern ourselves with such precision when assessing likelihoods in our every day lives? The difference between that number and 0 is so small it is not worth considering. Anyone who can hold in their head the idea of "impossible" is so much closer to the true likelihood of hitting the jackpot than any notion "it's a very small chance, but it might just be me".

The lottery works because it encourages us to confuse "quite small" [chance of winning] with "absolutely tiny beyond almost anything we are capable of conceiving".

Except people do win, nearly every week.

[Zoidburg]

It is still in practice a form of homoepathic wealth re-distrubution.

[gordon taylor]

I've been doing that since the UK lottery began. Each Saturday, I don't buy a ticket with the numbers 1-6. I'm hundreds of pounds up on the deal so far.

The numbers 1 to 6 won't come up, ever. The numbers have to be random, and 1 to 6 is a pattern. The standard method of calculating the UK lottery gives something close to 1 in 14 million, but is actually around 1 in 12 million because there are two million patterns that can't come up - like 5,10,15,20,25,30 etc.

I thought it was called compression theory or something but maybe it is something else.

As an illustration - imagine a shotgun cartridge filled with six pellets. Fire it at a wall. Would you expect the holes to be a perfect line? It just ain't possible. There's some hyper smart maths and modelling behind all these lotteries.

[red marley]

You're right, I hadn't thought of that. That would explain why it is impossible to toss a coin two times and get heads twice in a row.

[Pancho]

Gordy, fancy a game of chance for money?

[DuncanM]

So how do they enforce this random pattern matching stuff then?  With a vat of balls and a machine that selects some one at a time, I don't see how that's possible.  I also fail to see why it's desirable.  So what if it's a pattern, you get random patterns in nature.  There's no greater or lesser probbility of 1-6 than any other set of 6 numbers if it is truly random.
What about all the other patterns?  Fibonacci sequence, primes, etc.  There have to be lots of possible patterns.

With your shotgun, if you do it enough times, it will be in a dead straight line at least once.  The only question is how many times is "enough"?

[Martin]

the normal Lotto does give some sort of gratification short of hitting the big one; every few weeks you'll get £10 back; maybe even offsetting what you've spent on entries in the previous weeks.  Not sure if Euromillions has this; probably not, like the jackpot only Lotto.

I got £75 for 4 numbers once; I bought some nice things I still have. I probably paid it all back later but at the time it seemed worthwile.

On the subject of insurance; we stopped paying the pet insurance on our cat when he reached 8 and the premiums went sky high. He got kidney failure when he was 12 and cost quite a bit during his last 3 years; but I still think we saved in the long term; I think the insurance would have only paid a set maximum amount anyway.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

The numbers 1 to 6 won't come up, ever. The numbers have to be random, and 1 to 6 is a pattern.

But the machine doesn't know what numbers the balls happen to have painted on them. Any six balls can come out. The fact the numbers painted on them might be what we recognise as a pattern is utterly irrelevent. 1 2 3 4 5 6 is as likely as 12 19 22 32 35 41 is as likely as 7 8 9 10 11 12.