Independent site. CasinoCalcs is not affiliated with or endorsed by any lottery operator, including the National Lottery, Allwyn and Ireland’s National Lottery. Game names are used only to describe the rules the maths is based on.
- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
People ask how to improve your lottery odds expecting a trick, and there isn’t one. You can buy more lines, you can club together in a syndicate, or you can switch to a game that’s easier to win. That’s the full list. Play one £2 UK Lotto line every Wednesday and Saturday for a decade and you’ll have had roughly a 1 in 21,700 shot at the jackpot across all of it. The free calculator above lets you pull each of those levers and see the cost as well.
How to improve your lottery odds with more lines, a syndicate or a smaller game
More lines. Every different line is one more combination covered, so ten lines are ten times likelier than one. It also costs ten times as much, which is the catch. Going from two lines to twenty on UK Lotto takes your chance per draw from 1 in 11.3 million to 1 in 1.1 million. That sounds like progress until you notice it’s still 1 in 1.1 million.
A syndicate. Twenty friends putting in £2 a draw buy twenty lines. Over ten years of Wednesdays and Saturdays, the group’s chance of a jackpot is about 0.092%, against 0.0046% for one line on your own. You pay the same £2, so it’s the cheapest way to raise the chance of a win. What you give up is the size of your cut, a twentieth if the group wins. Your long-run return doesn’t budge; you’ve just traded a microscopic shot at the lot for a slightly less microscopic shot at a share. Friendships have ended over less, so agree the rules on paper before anyone buys a ticket (there’s a ready-made syndicate agreement), and when the day comes, let the syndicate calculator do the dividing.
A different game. Jackpot odds vary a lot. Thunderball’s top prize is 1 in 8,060,598; EuroMillions is 1 in 139,838,160, about 17 times harder. The smaller game pays a smaller prize, of course. Compare them all on which lottery has the best odds.
What doesn’t change your odds
Hot numbers, cold numbers, numbers that are ‘due’, your lucky dates, a Lucky Dip instead of your own picks: none of them makes any line likelier. Every combination has the same chance in every draw, and the balls don’t remember last week.
One thing is worth doing, though, and it’s about the prize rather than the odds. Lots of people pick birthdays, so lines full of numbers under 32 are more likely to be shared if they win. Picking higher numbers, or using a Lucky Dip, doesn’t make you any likelier to win, but it can mean a bigger slice if you do. Avoid 1-2-3-4-5-6 for the same reason; thousands of people play it.
Using the calculator
Pick a lottery, set how many lines are bought each draw and how many people share them, then the years. The CasinoCalcs calculator gives the chance of a jackpot over that time, the average wait, what you’ll spend and what the same money would buy you alone. If the average wait reads ‘tens of thousands of years’, that’s not a mistake. For every prize tier rather than just the jackpot, use the lottery odds calculator, and for a wider look at your spending, the lottery reality check.
Play the lottery for fun, with money you won’t miss. No method makes it a plan for getting rich. If it stops being fun, BeGambleAware.org will talk to you for free, in confidence.