If I win £1000, should I spent the lot on lottery tickets?

[HardMaths]

Hi,

I just had a really dumb idea and I wondered if I could ask what you think?

I'm not actually proposing to do it.

Getting to the point though:

I just filled in a survey with George at ASDA and it gives the possibility of winning £1000.

If I won the money, would I get even more money if I spent the lot on lottery tickets or lottery scratchcards?

I know the answer is that I shouldn't. However, I also know that there is a probability calculation that I need to do to work that out, and I wondered if any of the wise MNers know how to do that calculation?

Premium bonds would surely be a better bet? That way you might win more, and if you don’t you can cash them in and get your £1000 back.

@HarryLimeFoxtrot says what I came on to say.

Do you know how to do the probability calculation though?

But to win the jackpot on the Lotto, the odds are considerably slimmer. To bag the top prize, you need to have six matching balls. The odds of doing this and scooping the jackpot are currently 1 in 45,057,474.

£1,000 only buys 500 tickets on lotto.

Which lottery game? (The odds aren’t the same across the board). And what is your criteria for ‘winning’? Is it ending up with more than £1000?

That's some pretty long odds then.

I believe the probability balances out that your £1000 becomes about £450

math.stackexchange.com/questions/439281/probability-of-an-event-happening-n-or-more-times

I think it's this one

If you know the probability of one ticket winning the lottery p ( say 1/100000) one in a million

And the probability of not q (99999/1000000)

And you can buy 750 tickets

Very small anyway !

How about the national lottery on a non-rollover week?

What are the chances of winning, say, £1000 back plus a fiver.

Premium Bonds as per PP. You still have your 1K, but have a chance of winning and can build it up

http://lottery.merseyworld.com/Info/Chances.html

This page says:

• 5 Numbers (Typical prize: £1,500)
• This is 42 times more likely than getting 5 numbers + the bonus number because, after the first six balls are drawn, there are 43 balls left and you can match 42 of these 43 balls without matching the bonus number. Therefore the chance is 1 in 2,330,636/42, which evaluates to 1 in 55,491.33333.

So the chance of getting more than £1000 is 1 in 55,491.33333.

Is that right?

Blimey there's loads of different ones.

Interesting. Place marking to read later although my instinct is that you have a million to one chance of winning anything even staking £1000 and so you would be pissing £1000 down the drain. But I'd love to see the actual statistics. Maybe statistics says you'd win £1 or something.

I think you're probably right.

There must be some cross-over point where you buy basically all the tickets and are guaranteed to win the jackpot, but might mean buying literally all the tickets.

We need a probabilist.

They did this on Radio X a while ago. I can't remember the exact figures but they bought £1000 worth of scratch cards which could have been worth £30million if they'd all won the jackpot. In the end they won something like £400 so didn't even make the money back!

I'm sure this has been done by a syndicate on a lottery (not UK) that had a massive rollover jackpot once. I'm off to Google.

Dealer always wins

The gambling business is so successful because the odds aren't in your favour

https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times-part-1
Here it is so you need more than £1000 and a much bigger jackpot.

I would ask a statistitian. Or an actuary. There would be variables to consider, plus a myriad of other clever mathsy stuff
But gut feeling: would rather have stuff for garden

Wow! Thanks, that's amazing. It will take me quite a while to get my head around that. It'll stop me doomscrolling on rubbish though. Thank you very much.

My Dad is a statistician. Brain the size of a planet. He doesn’t do the lottery. He does have max premium bonds.

In 1995 when the numbers only went up to 49 or 50 7-20 people more frequently shared the jackpot.

Nope

April 1995 x14 shared more than 18 & a half million, that many don’t share jackpots any more.