Forget gambling, here's how to guarantee a 'Lotto' win

Friday, 30 November 2018

If you bought a $28 TripleDip ticket every week for 30 years, you could spend $43,680.

Like many New Zealanders, you may be planning to buy a Lotto ticket for this weekend.

We buy millions of Lotto tickets each year - according to the latest annual report, Lotto clocked up $1.05 billion in sales in the most recent financial year. That's not including Instant Kiwi, and is $50 million more than was spent the year before.

The minimum spend is $2.80 per week entered but you can add additional lines for 70c each. Powerball is another 80c a line. 'Dips' are available for up to $28 per draw.

But how likely is that to turn into millions, in reality?

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Sam Stubbs shares his thoughts on Lotto.

All you need to do is match the numbers on your ticket to the numbers drawn on the night.

Sounds simple, right?

The odds of getting just the six numbers required for first division is one in 3.8 million per line.

Once you've managed that, to get the really big prize, you need to get the Powerball, too - a one-in-ten chance.

That means the likelihood of getting all seven in a row and taking home millions of dollars is one in 38.3 million for each line you play.

And the bad news is, no matter how many weeks you play for over your life, your chance of winning is exactly the same on the 500th attempt as it was on the first.

The numbers that popped up last week are just as likely to pop up again this week – or never.

If you bought a $28 TripleDip ticket every week for 30 years, you could spend $43,680 and end up with a return of zero.

But what if there was a guaranteed way to 'win' a Lotto jackpot?

The best way to land a decent sum of money is to take what you would have spent on your Lotto ticket, and put it somewhere else.

If you opted to put what you would spend on a $28 TripleDip into another investment you'd be guaranteed a return.

If you put it into KiwiSaver starting from when you were 25, you'd amass $142,845 over your working life, even if you did not have any employer contributions going in.

Put it into a term deposit paying 5 per cent and you could get to $81,593 over 40 years.

Or, if you had a $500,000 mortgage, over 25 years at 5 per cent interest, and chose to put your Lotto money on your loan instead, you could save a year of payments and almost $33,000 in interest.

However, if you decide to persist with Lotto there are some tactics you can use to better your chances of success: Don't go for obvious combinations (remember the recent draw when 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13 came up and 38 people won first division?).

Buy tickets in draws where a jackpot must be won, so there's more chance of bigger prizes at lower divisions. Don't buy last week's numbers - apparently lots of people use this tactic, so you're more likely to have to split any prize.