- Fact-checked by Josh Miller
- Edited by Diana Westfield
Lucky dip or your own numbers? It’s one of the oldest lottery arguments, and the maths gives a clear answer with a twist. Your chance of winning is exactly the same either way: 1 in 45,057,474 for a single UK Lotto jackpot round, whether the numbers came from your kids’ birthdays or the terminal’s random generator. The twist is that how you choose numbers changes how many people you’d share a jackpot with. That’s where the lucky dip has a real, quiet advantage.
Lucky dip odds: exactly the same as any line
The lottery machine doesn’t know which numbers are on tickets. Every combination of six numbers is equally likely, and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is as likely as 7, 19, 23, 31, 44, 58. It doesn’t matter whether a person or a computer picked them. So “more lucky dips win the jackpot” is true and meaningless: most tickets sold are lucky dips, so most winners are too.
Where it makes a difference: sharing the prize
People choosing their own numbers aren’t random. Birthdays push picks into 1 to 31. Patterns on the play slip, lines down the middle, and favourite numbers like 7 are hugely popular. When a jackpot falls on numbers a lot of people chose, it’s split many ways. A draw full of low numbers can produce a jackpot shared between dozens of winners, while a spread of high numbers might have one.
A random line avoids those clusters, so on the rare day it does win, it’s less likely to be sharing. That doesn’t change your chance of winning, only what a win is worth on average. If you like your own numbers, you get the same benefit by avoiding the obvious: include a few numbers above 31, skip neat patterns and sequences, and don’t use numbers from the last draw.
What doesn’t help
Hot and cold numbers, “due” numbers and systems that track past draws don’t change anything; the balls have no memory. Playing more lines raises your chance in a straight line, two lines double it, but so does the cost. The CasinoCalcs lottery odds calculator shows what any number of lines does to your odds, and the UK Lotto number generator gives you a lucky dip at home if you’d like a random line to play. For how the draw itself works, see how to play Lotto.