Australian Lotto - What really are the odds? Plus a couple of strategies...

So I have always been a bit of a gambler. I love a punt, enjoy playing Lotto, and dream of one day winning the jackpot, being able to retire, and live out my days doing whatever I like - generally the vision involves a tropical seaside location, cold beer and cocktails, and not a care in the world...

I'm sure such a dream is common amongst many of us, which is why casinos, lottery companies, pokie clubs and bookies all seem to do so well. It is human nature to strive to exit the rat race I believe, especially for the common man, a class I certainly belong to.

Anyway, enough drivel. The point of the blog is this: Lately there have been some big jackpots around in Oz Lotto and Powerball, and also a couple of Saturday Lotto Superdraws. I have been playing all of them to a degree, but mostly through syndicates. In my mind I have always been aware that Oz and PB are higher odds than Saturday, but I just wasn't sure by how much. So I did some research, some calc's, and have come up with the table below:

The odds are taken directly off The Lott website, and I have calculated the cost of an individual game, although for all bar the last two, you generally buy a minimum of six. As you can see, Mon/Wed Lotto is the cheapest by game, also providing the best odds, together with Saturday. Saturday's games are a bit more expensive, although provide for bigger potential prizes - Mon/Wed is a max of $1m for up to four people, whereas Sat is $5m-$40m, but shared amongst however many winners there are. 

Next step, considering we're talking millions to one at best for a single game, was to consider how many games I would need to play to get to a "reasonable" set of odds of 10,000 to 1. As you can see, for M/W/S that is 810 games. This would cost $493-$668. A lot of coin for a single draw. But then consider the others - Oz Lotto would require a $9,016 investment, and Powerball a crazy $16,364 one! And that's just for 10,000 to 1 odds! The rest are better, but still much worse than M/W/S.

So the first conclusion for me is this: I play only Mon/Wed and Sat Lotto! The one exception is a very small Set For Life game I keep going, as I like having just a little action on a daily basis. It costs me $37/month to do that. But for general Lotto play, let's ignore Oz, PB and the Lotteries products.

The next thing to consider is what does this mean in terms of what I am happy to spend? Well, I set myself a limit of $100 per week. As you can see from the 1/10,000 calc's, that doesn't get me the 493-668 required. Actually, before I continue, stuff it - I am not going to play M/W either, not for a maximum prize of $1 million. If I had more to spend then maybe, but I don't, so let's keep it simple and say we are Saturday Lotto players only now (with the small SFL caveat). So that means, $100 spend doesn't get us the 668 games needed for 1 in 10,000, it actually gets us 121 games. This then equates to 1 in 66,825 odds per week. Better than 1 in 8.1 million for sure, but still fairly long.

So, what if we want to reduce those odds even further? Well, they have always been around, but now are available on the website, for any store in your state, and that is Store Syndicates. These are awesome, because they give you a much better chance of a prize. For instance, I play a couple regularly - one is a System 11 and a System 10 ticket. A 1/15th share costs you $37.06, and is equivalent to 672 games! To buy that ticket yourself would cost you $37.06 x 15 = $555.90, too big a splurge on Lotto for most of us I imagine. So getting this kind of action in a syndicate is a great way to go. Of course the downside is that if you win, you only get 1/15th of the prizemoney too. Still, you get multiples in systems games. For instance if you won Division 1 in a System 11 game, well you get the Div1 prize of course, but you also get Div3 30 times, Div4 150 times and Div6 200 times! I have only ever got a max of four numbers in one of these, but that still returns Div4 21 times and Div6 140 times!

My weekly $100 spend is going to look something like this:

I have a single Systems 8, with lucky family numbers in it, the two regular shop syndicates where I live, plus a Quickpick 18 games ticket to get it close to $100. That gives me a mix of both regular games, my own systems and syndicates. As you can see in the table, that's the equivalent of 830 games, which is awesome! However, when you apply the syndicate shares to those tickets, I get only 6.7% and 10% of the two of them.

To put this in perspective, looking at history, there is roughly an average of two Div1 winners each Saturday. Given the average prize is $5m, that means the average divisional prize is $2.5m. The next table shows the two different approaches and what it means for your potential winnings:

For the normal $100 spend, giving 121 games, if you win, you get the lot. So that means a 1 in 66,825 chance of winning $2.5m. For the mixed approach, which I am employing for now, line by line you can calculate the number of games against the total, then apply the percentage of the prize you would win - 100% for my own Sys8 and the Quickpick, and those smaller percentages for the syndicate tickets. That result is a 1 in 9,759 chance of winning a reduced prize of $307,229.

I hope that spells it out clearly enough. Tonight is the NYE Superdraw, worth a cracking $40m! I have my new approach in it, plus a couple of extras. Wish me luck!