Lottery

A new page introducing an entertaining and informative program for generating lottery numbers and simulating multiple  draws.

This software could save you a lot of stake money.....read on to find out how....

Many moons ago, in the early days of the UK National lottery, I decided to  put together something to generate Lottery numbers. This led me to investigate whether it's possible to predict the numbers, or at least improve the odds by selecting certain number combinations.  The first attempt at developing some software to do this was using the old GWBASIC language and compiler, but then morphed into an Excel-based system for ease of access on modern pcs.

The firm conclusion I came to back then was that the answer to my question was: No,  it really isn't ...

There's a good reason for this - the range of numbers used and the design of the draws ensures that things are effectively random and the likelihood of winning really big prizes is incredibly low. As  for most lotteries, the structures are also designed to make as much money as possible for the lottery organisers (this applies to the betting industry generally - it wouldn't exist otherwise!). In the case of the UK 'mainstream' lotteries , of course,  most of the proceeds do go to good causes. 

To convince myself that playing the lottery was almost certain to be an overall loss-maker for the player, I also designed a simulator for generating large numbers of entries and comparing them to a selection of previous results. I've extended the package considerably since its first version  and added some instructions.

The resulting  Excel workbook allows you to 'test the water' for  yourself in the same way as I did for the three main UK lotteries: Lotto, EuroMillions and the Health Lottery.  

If you do decide to go on playing, there's also a handy page dedicated to generating single number entries for these three main lotteries, and for the Thunderball and Lotto HotPicks draws. Rest assured, you will be no less likely to win by using these than by selecting numbers by any other route.

The prize structure tables can be edited to reflect any future changes in prize amounts or stake cost. Before using, please check whether the prize structures shown are up to date.

I hope the workbook  will be useful, and provides some entertainment, as well as giving you some valuable insight into likely outcomes. It may perhaps even influence your future 'investments' in lottery tickets

If you're convinced lotteries are a loss-maker, but still want to have a regular flutter at a much lower financial cost, why not consider NS&I 's premium bonds (PBs) ? You're not, of course, guaranteed to win anything there either, but at least you'll keep your stake money - and  you could still 'win a million' in the monthly draws. 

This is a particularly good time to look at PBs, now that  NS&I have increased the prize fund in order to  compete with the much higher savings interest rates now being offered by Building Societies and the 'challenger' banks.

For those with a bit more to invest, they can even provide a regular income with an average  estimated yield for those with the maximum £50k holding currently at 3.3%. 

If you're unlucky enough to have been caught by Sunak's odious 'stealth' tax in the form of a 5-year income tax threshold freeze, and now find yourself paying a significant amount of tax at 40% or more, PBs are even more attractive, since all your winnings are all tax-free.... this effectively means that you have an extra £50,000 one-off ISA allowance to make use of. Use it or lose it ... (and no, I don't work for them !)

Download link to the Excel workbook here

One word of warning - to make best use of the package, you'll need to set your Excel security settings to 'Allow macros' for the VBA code which does the work to run.  You can do this via 'File'-'Options'-'Trust Center'-'Trust Center Settings'-'Macro Settings'-'Enable All Macros'. (you can also use the 'Enable content' button to run the file without changing your settings, but you will need to do this every time you run it).

To see the comments in the INFO boxes, you may need to adjust your 'Comments' settings to make them visible - check  the help for your version of Excel if you can't see the comments when hovering over the INFO cells.