Why has the Lotto jackpot not been won ?

Further observation:
On Saturday 20th Nov there were 40 winners of Match 5, each receiving just over €1,500. The numbers drawn were 9,14,22,32,38,42
On Saturday 6th Nov there were 120 winners of Match 5, each receiving just over €500. The numbers drawn were 5,6,9,15,19,25
And the pattern is repeated for the lower prizes.

We see here the "birthday" effect. The earlier draw could have come from all birthdays, not so the later draw. There is also the factor that original Lotto fans will have stuck to a selection of numbers which in those days had to come from 1 to 36.
The message is that you greatly reduce your expected individual* pay-out ratio by sticking to numbers 36 and under and vice versa. But the ploy of sticking to numbers in excess of 36 would also probably backfire as there only need to be about 1% smart asses doing that to counter the birthday syndrome. In a similar way the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 have every bit as much chance as any other selection but there only needs to be 1 in a 1,000 too smart for themselves asses to negate any advantage.

Probably best to pick 3 numbers in excess of 36. Off the top of my head I would say that this would push your expected pay-out ratio up to over 150% in current circumstances.

* the aggregate pay-out ratio is unaffected but because of sharing the individual pay-out is diluted
 
Last edited:

Thanks for this Duke. It's a good read. Just to summarise, you are suggesting cashing in all my investments, play the lotto while making sure that I pick 3 numbers over 36 and I am guaranteed to win €19m. That's my understanding anyway.....
 
Sunny said:
Thanks for this Duke. It's a good read. Just to summarise, you are suggesting cashing in all my investments, play the lotto while making sure that I pick 3 numbers over 36 and I am guaranteed to win €19m. That's my understanding anyway.....
Click to expand...
Not quite. Say you now enter Wednesday's draw. Your expected return is +50% per 2 days or something astronomical p.a. That surely beats what you expect on your investments.
BUT you run an enormous risk. For say even €100,000 worth of tickets my guess is that you are well odds on to lose over €30k (that's finger in the air, I haven't run the numbers), but a slight chance of winning €19m. Would you be happy with that risk/reward trade off?
Of course you could try covering the lot. Four problems with that. Firstly you will now have to cover the birthday numbers as well so your expected returns are down to +30% over 2 days. Secondly, there is a chance that you might have to share the €19m jackpot. Thirdly, do you have €21.5m to invest? Finally, try buying 10.7 million tickets between now and tomorrow's draw. And there is no point in starting now for Saturday as tomorrow could see the party over.
 
Last edited:

Well that puts a different slant on it. I will go back to my original plan and put everything on Bitcoin and Tesla!

I might just buy one ticket because it is nice going to bed thinking I could be back on AAM tomorrow asking for investment advice for my €19m......
 

it has been tried before

How a secret syndicate managed to 'buy' the Lotto

It was a Whit bank holiday weekend - and while most ordinary folk were heading off to enjoy the holiday, a small but dedicated band of gamblers spent the days leading up to that Saturday night in smoke-filled backrooms, plotting a coup that would make headlines around the world.
www.independent.ie
 
Duke of Marmalade said:
Not quite. Say you now enter Wednesday's draw. Your expected return is +50% per 2 days or something astronomical p.a. That surely beats what you expect on your investments.
BUT you run an enormous risk.
Click to expand...
While the discussion on the expected return is amusing I think there is a potentially very useful point on the relationship between risk and return.

The expected return on a lotto ticket for the current draw is €2 on a €1 investment. That is you have a 1 in 10 million chance of winning €20 million for a cost of €1, between now and draw time a €1 line is worth €2

There is a very large risk that the return will be zero with a small chance the return will be enormous. This is risk as understood by the average person. How does this relate to investment risk?
 
Incredibly 531 chose 1,2,3,4,5,6 . I guessed that there would be people who realising that this combination had the same chance as any other but would be the unlikely choice of a typical player and would therefore think they were unlikely to be duplicated. What they didn't realise is that there were 531 duplicates of similar thinking people
 
cremeegg said:
The expected return on a lotto ticket for the current draw is €2 on a €1 investment. That is you have a 1 in 10 million chance of winning €20 million for a cost of €1, between now and draw time a €1 line is worth €2
Click to expand...
A line cost €2. But you can expect a €1 payout in non jackpot prizes. So the overall worth of a line is €1 in non jackpot prizes + €2 in jackpot prizes equals €3 in total, a mark up of 50%. (This ignores a reduction for leakage due to sharing of the jackpot).

On your point abut the price of investment risk. This is called the equity risk premium and is estimated to be in a range of 3% p.a. to 8% p.a., say. But Lotto risk is a completely different animal and if one imagined a free market with the risk profile of the Lotto one might expect very high risk premiums indeed.

Of course the paradox is that in the constrained market of the Lotto the normal situation is that the risk premium is negative. In fact it is well known that the average "value" of a lotto ticket is 52% of its cost but people are prepared to give up the 48% for the risk profile.
 
I don't think that was what they were thinking. More likely they just didn't understand what they were doing at all.

On a related note, it's a well know feature of our PR voting system that a good chunk of people vote 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, in alphabetical order, right down the ballot paper. Approximately 1% of the electorate does this. One of the reasons candidates tend to "manipulate" their surnames to get higher up the ballot paper. (Eg, dropping an O' so that O'Carroll becomes Carroll, inventing a creative new surname as Gaeilge, adding a suitable double-barrel etc etc.)
 
I don't think many people fill in the boxes in sequence, but it is true that being higher up on the ballot does make it easier to get higher vote preferences. If I recall, Beverly Cooper Flynn kept the double-barrel name after separating from Mr Cooper!
 
RetirementPlan said:
it is true that being higher up on the ballot does make it easier to get higher vote preferences
Click to expand...
The effect is small but material.

Order of candidates should be randomised. Either identically for each ballot paper, or something like ten types of ballot paper with different randomisations. The former just introduces non-alphabetical bias though but the latter would nearly eliminate it entirely.

This slows down the counting process a lot though.
 
I have done 5 Quick Picks for tonight's draw.
One of the QPs was 3,7,11,13,16,31 which breaks my rule!
Nonetheless my €10 investment is worth about €14 at this moment. (very likely to be worth zero at 8.10 tonight)
I am accepting bids over €13.

Warning for novice investors: If you ask in a shop for a lotto ticket they will ask you if you want Lotto Plus. You don't. Lotto Plus involves an additional €1 investment which buys you into 2 supplementary draws but these do not benefit from the €19m carried forward jackpot.

Further trivia. Listening to Joe Duffy on Tuesday (my excuse, I was in the roller and the Duchess never misses him). He is going on about the Lotto these days. Some really ill informed commentary including from Joe himself. One in particular had me screaming at the radio. Some guy who works for Google claimed to have won €100,000 this year on the Lotto. I do not doubt him, in fact I think he showed evidence to Joe.
His formula? He backs the various spin offs that are offered by Paddy Power which he claims are far better value (on average that is correct), but here's the killer, he follows the "form" of the numbers coming up and can predict the higher likelihood numbers in a future draw. Joe seemed to believe him, after all the guy worked for Google. I kid you not.
 
Last edited:
He probably doesn't understand probability.
 


I think we can safely assume the €100,000 didn't last long......
 
An Taoiseach drops hint a winner is needed in the Lotto...

THE NATIONAL LOTTERY regulator could be asked to appear before the Dail’s Finance Committee, the Taoiseach has suggested, after concerns were raised that the jackpot has not been won for months.

National Lottery regulator could be asked to appear before Oireachtas Committee

The lengthy wait for a winner has led to some calls for greater scrutiny of the lotto system.
www.thejournal.ie
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register