If there’s one thing we love at Bother’s Bar it’s a wacky lottery result in lieu of actual news. Take last night’s Lotto for example, the numbers were 7, 14, 21, 35, 41, 42 and the Bonus was 43.
This led to a slightly bizarre situation where as the only guaranteed prize (other than the free tickets for matching 2, and except in exceptional circumstances) 114,232 people won £25 for matching three balls. 7,879 people won £51 for matching four balls (towards the lower end of what you’d expect with four balls, the estimated prize is around £100). But spare a thought for the 4,082 five ball winners, normally you’d expect to win £1,000 estimated, instead winning just £15 each – a lower prize than matching fewer balls.
How has this happened? The Lotto pays out according to a defined prizepool structure, 2% of the Lotto pools fund goes to the five ball winners, split equally. Normally this would be split by around 50-100 people, but yesterday it was split by over 4,000.
This is a freak result, albeit not unheard of, but look at the numbers involved – five of them are multiples of seven, if that 41 was a 28 you’d probably be looking at over 4,082 jackpot winners winning £6,096 each – thank goodness for rollovers otherwise it’d be more like twenty quid. That’s always the danger of going for patterned numbers, if you win you’re almost certainly going to be winning less.
It’s not the first time those multiples of seven have caused havoc… only eight months ago:
Wed 15 July 2015 [Draw 2041]
4 7 14 21 22 29 + 41
Prize Pool: £6.547m
Match 3 : 208,760 = £5.219m (79.7%)
For some bizarre reason, Camelot didn’t invoke the reduced prize clause, and paid out £25 to ALL match 3 winners… this left just £1.33m in the main prize pool for the other four prize tiers
Match Four: 14,811 winners got LESS at £21
Match Five: 331 winners got £181
Match Five+: Five winners got £14,156
Match Six: Two winners got £443,377
Source: http://lottery.merseyworld.com/archive/Lott2041.html
Also: http://lottery.merseyworld.com/archive/Lott1945.html (August 2014: 5 20 30 for the multiples of five)
I suspect these two draws were a driving reason for the change to 59 numbers – twice in a year match four paid less than match three AND they couldn’t pay a million for the jackpot!
The infamous draw of 1995 is still the gold standard though – 133 jackpot winners and 246 5+B winners (both still records to this day).
Until I looked at the draw procedures I assumed that the Pools fund is all the prizemoney minus raffle, two and three ball winners, but my reading on it suggests this is not the case, it’s just under 18% of ticket sales, they hold some back in contingency for this sort of instance where there are loads of match three winners.
Have I read that right?
Also in my head that 1995 draw had a bigger bonus prize than jackpot, but I’m clearly conflating draws events there.
In the 59-ball lottery, 47.5% of ticket sales goes to the prize fund:
* 22.75% to the “capped fund” (match 2, 3)
* 17.82% to the “pools fund” (match 4 and above)
* 6.93% allocated to the raffle draw
The modern rules indicate the reserve fund can support the raffle draw in full, and the capped fund by up to £8m in any given draw – and likewise, surplus funds from these will go back into the reserve fund.
In the event the capped fund of 22.75% + £8m is insufficient then the prize capping will apply… the minimum prize guaranteed by Camelot for Match 3 is just £2!
If we applied the above model to draw 2041:
* Match 3 would need £1.7m from the reserve fund
* Match 4+ would gain £1.5m or an increase of 109% – the jackpot jumps from £886k to £1.85m and Match 4 a more respectable £43
—
Coming back to the original topic, interesting to compare this with the Match 5 result from 1995:
* Draw 9: 6,660 winners (1 in 10,487 tickets vs 1 in 55,491 expected) – 1.72% of ticket sales paid £181 to each winner
* Draw 2113: 4,082 winners (1 in 4,348 tickets vs 1 in 144,415 expected) – 0.34% of ticket sales paid £15 to each winner
A much smaller pot of money coupled with a hugely abnormal result = a lot of unhappy winners!
Here’s an example of how the liability limits work in the US- This is a new regional game (6 states, mainly on the East Coast) called Cash 4 Life, the relevant info is on pages 8-10 pf the document..
http://cdn.mdlottery.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Rules%20and%20Regulations/Cash4Life%20Maryland%20Rules.pdf
(for the big US Games like Powerball, it’s pretty much the same with a few exceptions- for example, in California the non-jackpot prizes are done on a pari-mutuel basis)
French’s National Lottey had a similar incident at the end of the 80’s with one of their daily lottery games called Tapis Vert . Pretty simple : you had to choose from Ace to 7 in each of the four suits of a standard 32-card deck , get all four of them and win a thousand times your stake.
I think you can easily guess what happened a few months after the game started : http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9xuwu_tirage-du-tapis-vert-exceptionnel_webcam
Four aces – which unsurprisingly happened to be the most played combination. The issue weren’t for the players… but for the Lottery. There wasn’t any liability rules at the time so everyone got his full winnings. And the French lottery got hid hard, very hard. There was many rumors at the time about the French lottery being on the verge of bankruptcy due to this event, but it was never confirmed.
Wowsers, only 4096 combinations, not an outlandish event in the slightest.
There was an infamous lottery game in Massachusetts a few years back that had a flaw some MIT students managed to take advantage of…
https://slice.mit.edu/2012/08/14/winning-the-lottery/
Basically, the game had a must-win limit; if the jackpot hit a certain amount and wasn’t won, it would be rolled down to the lower prizes, multiplying them several times over- and because of that, those drawings (which occurred relatively often) had an expected value per ticket more than the cost of the ticket (because of the better odds of getting the increased lower-level prizes)- so if you bought in bulk, you could make a decent amount of money. So they did to the tune of $3.5 million before the lottery put in a rule to limit the number of sales any one retailer could sell in a day, which made the scheme impractical (and they ended up dropping the game entirely the following year).
And of course there are other ways to work the system….not all of them legal..
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/cops-lottery-terminal-hack-allowed-suspects-to-print-more-winning-tickets/
I do think at least all prizes should be a guaranteed minimum of £25. This is where leaving it to formulas causes problems though – they could have easily enough swiped £400k from the jackpot so match 5 at least got £100.
Prizes beyond the £10 level though seem worse now than when tickets were £1, especially the 5+Bonus which used to probably buy a house, but now you’re lucky if it’ll get you the deposit.