All the chances of winning on the National Lottery

The sixth Murderous Maths book "Do You Feel Lucky?" explains that the chance of matching all six numbers in the UK's National Lottery draw is 1 in 13,983,816. However you can also win prizes if you match three, four, five or "five plus the bonus ball".

Here are the approximate chances of all the different prizes:

And just for interest, here are some other chances:

Sadly we didn't have space in the book to tell you where all these numbers come from, so instead it's all here.

WARNING..... If you haven't read "Do you feel lucky?" you might find some of the sums on this page a bit scary! Before you read on, would you like to know where the number 13,983,816 comes from?

How to calculate the different chances

The main thing to know is that the total number of ways of choosing your six numbers is:

JACKPOT CHANCE: only ONE of these ways will win you the jackpot, so the jackpot chance is 1 in 13,983,816 or about 1 in 14 million

MATCHING THREE NUMBERS: we have to work out how many ways you can select your six numbers so that three of them match up and three of them don't.

To start with, of the six numbers that are actually drawn, you need a combination of three of them, so how many combinations of 3 can you choose from 6? It's:

Your other three numbers must come from the 43 numbers that are not drawn, so the number of combinations of 3 can you choose from 43 is...

To get the total number of combinations that include 3 matching numbers and 3 that don't match, you multiply these answers together.

You get 20 x 12341 = 246,820. That's how many ways you can match three winning numbers, so your chances of matching 3 numbers are 246,820 in 13,983,816. Obviously this looks a bit mind boggling, so to make it simpler you divide 13,983,816 by 246,820 to work out that the chance of matching 3 numbers is roughly 1 in 57

MATCHING FOUR NUMBERS: this time we need to see how many ways there are of picking four numbers from the winning six, and then multiply this by how many ways there are of picking two numbers from the 43 losers. The sums look like this:

As there are 13,545 ways of matching four winning numbers, your chances are 13,545 in 13,983,816. It works out that the chance of matching 4 numbers is roughly 1 in 1,032

MATCHING FIVE NUMBERS: this time we need to see how many ways there are of picking five numbers from the winning six, and then multiply this by how many ways there are of picking one number from the 43 losers. (This last bit's easy: if you have a choice of 43 things and you can choose one, how many choices have you got? 43 of course!) Here's the sums:

This means there are 258 ways of matching five winning numbers, but before we look at the chances, remember that with some of these ways your sixth number will also match the bonus number.

MATCHING FIVE NUMBERS AND THE BONUS: The sums here are slightly different. Have a think about this:

You've just seen the main six numbers drawn on the lottery. You've matched five of them, and are leaping about the room and kissing the telly. The trouble is that ONE of your chosen numbers did not match up.

We've just seen that there are 258 combinations of five numbers that will match. The seventh "Bonus" number is about to be drawn, so what are the chances of your unmatched number matching the bonus? As 6 numbers have already been drawn from the 49, there are there are 43 numbers left that the bonus can be chosen from, so it's 1 chance in 43.

We've already worked out that there are 258 combinations that match five balls, and 1 in 43 of these combinations will have the sixth ball match the bonus. Therefore the number of combinations that match five numbers PLUS the bonus is 1/43 x 258 = 6.

This leaves 258 -6 = 252 chances that match five numbers but NOT the bonus.

So for just five numbers, the chances are 252 in 13,983,816 which means the chance of matching 5 numbers without the bonus is roughly 1 in 55,491

And for five numbers and the bonus, the chances are 6 in 13,983,816 which means the chance of matching 5 numbers plus the bonus is 1 in 2,330,636 or roughly 1 in 2.3 million


Go THIS way Go THAT way

...and one FINAL bit of advice about the lottery:

If you're getting a ticket for the Saturday draw, be sure to buy it on the Friday or the Saturday. That's because if you buy it on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday you are actually more likely to have died by Saturday evening than you are to win the jackpot!


Back to "Do You Feel Lucky?"

Murderous Maths Main Index Page



Where does 13,983,816 come from?

The way the lottery works is that you have a card with the numbers 1-49 marked on it and you have to choose any six of them. What we need to work out is how many different ways you can choose 6 numbers out of the 49 available.

In maths we say "how many different combinations of 6 can we choose from a total of 49" and we write it with the numbers next to a big letter "C" as you can see in the diagram. To work it out you fill the numbers into the formula. (You can find out exactly where this groovy looking formula comes from in the book.)

To use the formula you need to know that the "!" sign is called a "factorial" which means you need to multiply the number by every smaller number down to 1. So for example 5! = 5x4x3x2x1 = 120. (Some calculators have a ! button on them.) If we wrote the top line of this formula out in full we'd get 49x48x47x46.... right down to ...4x3x2x1. The bottom line is 6x5x4x3x2x1 x 43x42x41x40...etc down to ...4x3x2x1.

It all seems awful but DON'T PANIC! The fun part is that monstrous sums like these cancel themselves to bits and you can actually rip though them really quickly. This one produces the answer that there are 13,983,816 combinations in total, and only ONE of them will win you the jackpot. So your chances of winning the jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816.

By the way, in the New Zealand lottery you choose 6 numbers from 1-40 so the total number of combinations is:

This makes your chances of winning the New Zealand jackpot 1 in 3,838,380, so you're almost four times as likely to win.

Now you've understood all this, let's get back to the top