Changes to the UK Lotto

[Frank]

As you will be aware the UK lotto draws are currently twice weekly on Saturday and Wednesday.

The UK operator Camelot has made the following announcement:-

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On Thursday 10th February, we are launching Lotto Plus 5 - a new National Lottery draw game that is played using your Lotto numbers. Lotto will remain unchanged but you will notice a change to the play slip with the addition of the option to enter Lotto Plus 5 draws.

Lotto Plus 5, is the new game that you can play using your Lotto numbers.
For an extra £1 your Lotto numbers are entered into five Lotto Plus 5 draws throughout the week
Lotto Plus 5 draws take place on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays
Just like Lotto, you win by matching three or more numbers with fixed prizes ranging from £2.50 to £250,000.

Lotto Plus 5 prize details

There are lots of prizes to win...
...from £2.50 for matching three main numbers, up to an incredible £250,000 for matching all six main numbers.

What's more, the prizes are fixed so you don't have to share them. Overall the odds of winning any prize across all five Lotto Plus 5 draws are 1:11.

Match & Win ....On Sun Mon Tue Thu Fri
6 main numbers £250,000
Match 5 plus bonus £25,000
Match 5 £2,500
Match 4 £25
Match 3 £2.50
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I am hoping that these Sun Mon Tue Thu Fri draws will be sufficiently different in their procedure (type of machine, range of ball sets) to be considered statistically different to the Saturday and Wednesday draws.
For people like me who only have sytems in place and time to keep up with the Sat and Wed results in real time for statistical analysis etc it creates a dilemma. Are the Sun Mon Tue Thu Fri draws classed as "The UK Lotto" for statistical purposes, or can they be a different draw and a different subset ? The prize structure for those draws is entirely different, different odds of winning for your pound.

I suppose all will be revealed next Thursday.....

 

[CMF]

Random Sets of numbers from Lotto Draws

Each Pick 6, Pool 49 Lotto draw is an Independent Event. You can string together any of these Events from any of the 6/49 games throughout the world and while it may not be as relevant as far as looking up whether you have won for a particular game, as far as a random set of numbers go, it is no different to any other well generated set. Which machine or ball set is used is irrelevant and I thought the UK Lottery gave up on that nonsense. If you disagree show us what distinguishes one from the other.

Interestingly, I recently generated 14 million CombSixes from a Pool of 49 using Mersenne Twister code. As expected 14 million did not give the 13,983,816 possible combinations. Even more interesting the Birthday Problem formula seems to well understate the average number of combinations needed to be more likely to get a duplicate according to the well regarded Mersenne Twister generated combs.

See -
Random Lotto Numbers using the Mersenne Twister
http://lottoposter.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=661

Colin Fairbrother

 

[Frank]

I think the key phrase here Colin is "well generated set". I know Camelots own Statisticians (Statistical Analysis Department at the University of Hertfordshire) and the UK lottery regulators statisticians are focussed on making sure that is true for the UK lottery. I doubt they do that by looking at lottery results from around the world ! No they would look at only the UK lottery, and report back on only the UK lottery. Yes they still do "that nonsense" with varying ball sets and varying machines, if that's what you mean. I'm interested in knowing what the above statisticians know about the UK lotto, so I'll be sticking to future UK results created by the same physical devices and procedures as past results have.

More information is now available about the new draws, and it has been revealed that the Lotto plus 5 numbers will be electronically generated, so I'm happy that I can discount the new results from the genuine UK lotto statistics set..
http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/player/p/help/lotterydrawgames/lottoplus5help.ftl#anchor_13

Regarding the much more interesting topic of the birthday problem, I read your analysis with particular interest. I had done my own research on this last year following this thread... http://www.lotto649.ws/anything-goes/12108-repeat-combination-soon-your-neighborhood.html which discusses it. I had quite independently arrived at the figure of a change from a probability of not repeating of 0.50002941 at 4403 draws to 0.49987197 at 4404 draws. However, to avoid this thread going off topic I will respond in that thread shortly with more detailed findings.