Pick your lottery
What happened
| Match | Times | Expected | Odds per line |
|---|
Every line in every draw is checked with the exact chance of each match. Prizes differ by game and change over time, so this simulator counts matches; for prize money see the game's own simulator or odds page. Play money only.
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
A lottery simulator lets you do something nobody can afford to do for real: play the same lines for 20, 50 or 200 years and look at the results. Pick a game in the free CasinoCalcs simulator above, set your lines and draws, and it plays every one of them with the exact odds of each match. Twenty years of one UK Lotto line twice a week is 2,080 draws, and the usual result is a few dozen match-3s and nothing much else.
Pick a lottery and play
The simulator has UK Lotto, EuroMillions, Thunderball, Set For Life, Irish Lotto, a 6/49-style game and Lotto Max built in, with each game’s ticket price filled in. Choose “Your own format” for anything else: how many balls, how many you pick and whether there’s a separate extra ball. Here’s what one line twice a week for 20 years tends to look like:
| Game | Spent | Usual best result | Jackpot odds per line |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK Lotto (two rounds) | £4,160 | Match 4, once or twice | 1 in 22.5 million per draw |
| EuroMillions | £5,200 | 3 + 1 star or 2 + 2 stars | 1 in 139.8 million |
| Thunderball | £2,080 | 3 + Thunderball, maybe 4 | 1 in 8.1 million |
| Irish Lotto | €4,160 | Match 4 | 1 in 10.7 million |
Run it a few times and the results move around, which is the point. Most runs look alike, and every so often a run turns up a match 5. The jackpot almost never appears, and the “years to expect one jackpot” figure tells you why.
Reading the results
The “Expected” column is what the long-run odds predict for your number of lines. “Times” is what this run actually produced. On the common matches they sit close together; on rare ones you’ll get 0 or 1 where the expectation is 0.3, and that’s normal variance, not a lucky or unlucky set of numbers. Every combination has the same chance, so there’s no system or “due” number that would show up differently.
This simulator counts matches, because prize amounts differ between games and draws. For prize money and net results, the game-specific simulators go further: the UK Lotto simulator, the EuroMillions simulator and the Powerball simulator. To compare jackpot odds side by side, see which lottery has the best odds, and to see what a habit costs over years, the lottery reality check.
It’s play money here. Real tickets add up. BeGambleAware.org offers free help if lottery spending worries you.