Along with simply ‘which lottery is the best?’ (to which my tongue in cheek answer is… ‘the lottery that just paid you the jackpot.’)

The Best Odds Of Winning

But it is a serious question, because the odds of the game are the number one factor that determine if you win or lose.

The lottery with the best odds is usually the one with the fewest balls drawn. So a pick 3 game is of course easier to win than a pick 4 game. Which is why the pick 3 prizes are much smaller.

Prize Matters

This is the hidden half of this question.

Because, yes you really want the game with the best odds. But you also want the jackpot to be big enough to get you excited. And the key is how you balance the two.

Yes, it’s great to win the pick 3 jackpot – but if winning that money won’t change your life at all, then you’re not playing the right game.

Compare Lottery Games

To compare lottery games well you need to understand the odds, and have an idea of how big a win would change your life. To make this super easy, use my tool to help you compare lottery odds.

Then you can pick which lottery game has the best odds for you.

Here’s a reminder why you should not get too carried away sharing the excitement of your big win…

A group of 30 factory workers and craftmen from Avellino in Italy won 33 Million Euros on Italy’s SuperEnaLotto in January 2008.

Now winners are normally anonymous in Italy anyway. But the SuperEnaLotto syndicate were obviously very happy with their win and were not quiet about it.

Unfortunately their good fortune reached the ears of the local Camorra crime clan, who asked around to find out the identities of the lucky winners – and then paid them all a visit. Not surprisingly they were successful in extracting 40,000 Euros out of a good number of them, presumably to help with their protection.

Avellino prosecutor Rosario Cantelmo said that police learnt of the pay-outs while investigating extortion rackets against other local businesses. Five suspects were arrested.

So when the day of your big win arrives, and the lottery company asks you to do a press conference, appear on TV or in a newspaper advert… say no and stay anonymous. Have a party to celebrate but don’t announce to the world why. Your life as a big winner will be a lot smoother.

Otherwise you too may find out what happens to lottery winners…

This week Ryanair gets hit by 50 claims to have been that angry customer. And can they have the money please.

Now I’m sure budget airline Ryanair is used to angry passengers… but normally passengers can correctly recall what they were angry about. Amusingly, only 10 of the wannabe scratchcard munchers were even passengers on the Poland to UK flight!

Unfortunately none of the remaining 10 bizarre claimants will be getting the money either. Ryanair confirmed that without being able to produce the winning ticket, the claim cannot be verified. A spokesman for Ryanair said:

Unfortunately, when the passenger ate his scratch card he chewed away his chance to pick up the €10,000 cash prize, which will now go to charity.

The moral of the tale being either a) don’t drink while flying, or b) it’s worth investing in that anger management counselling before you hit the jackpot.

I get asked this type of question quite often.

Surprisingly the answer depends on you.

The UK has various lottery games, from Hot Picks to Thunderball. All with different odds, all with different prize divisions and amounts. Some with very different methods of play. So it’s certainly confusing!

All lottery games balance the odds against size of the jackpot, i.e. bigger jackpot = harder to win. So the answer really depends on how big a prize you want to win.

Here’s Why…

Ignoring Hot Picks for just a moment.

Daily Play actually gives you the best odds of winning ANY prize (at 1 in 7.4), and the best odds of winning the top prize (1 in 888,030).

But of course that top prize is much smaller than the other games at just £30,000 – bigger jackpots are harder to win, right?

Hot Picks confuses this slightly too as you have to specifically choose which prize level you want to play for, Match 1, Match 2 etc. Most of the prizes are too small to bother (you may as well just play a slot machine!). But…

• Pick 4 odds are 1 in 14,126 for a £7,000 prize
• Pick 5 odds are 1 in 317,814 for a £130,000 prize

So both are actually easier to win the big prize than Daily Play. But remember with Hot Picks there are NO other prizes for matching less balls.

So while Pick 5 is nearly 3 times easier to win the big prize than Daily Play, and the prize is more than 4 times bigger – it’s Match all 5 or you get nothing at all.

So What Can You Do..?

All of which means – choose the game with the best odds, that offers a jackpot that’s big enough for YOU. Don’t simply go for the game with the biggest jackpot.

To help you figure out which game gives you the best chances of winning use my new lottery compare tool.

And, get in touch if you have any questions about the lottery.

Which makes the jackpot this Friday one of the biggest seen at a rather crazy €129 Million.

UK players are hoping this will be a home win, creating the largest UK EuroMillions winner ever. The current record holder is Les Scadding from Newport in South Wales who banked a mere £45.5 Million in November 2009. If a single player hit the jackpot this Friday they would win around £113 Million.

Want To Play..?

If you want to play this Friday but with a better chance of winning. And you wouldn’t mind sharing the jackpot, then think about playing with these guys. You get 36 times the chance of winning, and you could still walk away with a couple of million each.

The big crazy Spanish Christmas lottery draw is now over for 2009. Life in Spain can return to normal once more – well, back to preparations for Christmas celebrations anyway.

El Gordo Winning Numbers

The winning number of the big prize was 78294. And winners stories are already beginning to appear. One of the big winners was a work syndicate at troubled Spanish travel company Viajes Marsans. Great news for a company who were in the process of making a large numer of their staff redundant.

There are thousands of numbers, and tens of thousands of prizes with El Gord. If you want to check your numbers here’s the full El Gordo results.

€2.3 Billion of El Gordo Prizes Won

When the dust settles this superdraw lottery will have paid out an incredible 2.3 billion Euros to winners. Just for this one draw. It doesn’t have anything like the biggest jackpot, but it is still the biggest lottery in the world.

Did you play this year? Did you win? Let us know below.

Seriously, the entire country comes to a halt when this ONCE A YEAR draw hits.

The draw process takes HOURS because there are so many prizes. It’s quite a bizarre thing to watch the enormous draw machine, with all the results and prizes sung out by children from a local school (El Gordo draw).

It’s THE biggest lottery draw in the world. No other game has a bigger prize fund, OR pays out as many prizes.

Welcome to the Spanish ‘El Gordo’ (or ‘The Fat One’).

World’s Biggest Prize Fund

This draw pays out a prize fund of BILLIONS.

Not millions, but Billions!

But they are clever enough to keep the prizes smaller BUT pay a lot more of them. Unlike certain dumb mega-draws that insist on paying 200 million to just one prize winner… duh!

These are just the bigger prizes:-

• 195 x €3 Million prizes
• 195 x €1 Million prizes
• 195 x €500,000 prizes
• 390 x €200,000 prizes
• 1,560 x €50,000 prizes

World’s LONGEST Draw

And these are genuine different prizes. They draw tens of thousands of numbers from a huge drum, and each one wins a different prize.

The whole draw takes place on TV, and all of Spain is gripped with excitement, for HOURS!

It’s like some weird mass hypnosis voodoo or something.

Strictly Limited Ticket Supply

You can’t pick your numbers with this draw. You can only buy pre-printed tickets. Which means this once a year draw has a limited supply of tickets – by design.

Once they are sold out, that is it.

A large chunk are reserved by Spanish families – some numbers you just cannot ever buy. Seriously!

So if you want to play, now is the time.

I’ve only played this one for the last 2 draws. Last year I found a better supplier which was way cheaper, and I won and got paid a few small prizes.

I’m using the same guys again this year for El Gordo. I reckon the only way to get better value is if you live in Spain! So you can do a LOT worse than play with these guys.

See you in the big draw .

(And yup, that’s how it goes for HOURS..! Every prize and every winning number is drawn – then sung out by kids from the local school. All of Spain is gripped the whole way through.)

El Gordo is the massive once a year Christmas lottery draw – it has a ridiculous prize fund of BILLIONS.

Here’s why I like it though:-

It pays out thousands of big prizes NOT crazy amounts to just a few people. And that means much better chances of winning a big prize – because there are so many more of them. Not to mention the HUGE volume of smaller prizes too.

Makes sense right? (Try telling the folks who run US Mega Millions…)

You have to be careful where you buy tickets for El Gordo though – a lot of online places will charge you stupid amounts.

(I played with these guys last year – good service, decent price, won a few small prizes and got paid promptly – so I’m playing with them again this year).

Bet your country has nothing like this for a lottery draw..?

[A] There are lots of interesting things you can do with old lottery results. You can apply all sorts of analysis on past results, and come up with lots of intriguing things.

Even the lottery companies do it themselves. Many official lottery sites have things like lottery frequency checker tools on them, so you can see how often each ball has been drawn.

But the problem with this kind of analysis, is that it’s entirely useless in predicting what’s going to happen next.

Here’s why…

Lottery Randomness Looks Weird

I know this sounds a bit Douglas Adams but the big problem with randomness is that it can often look so very unrandom.

For something to be truly random, all results have to be possible.

So for there to be any significance in some numbers appearing more often than others, there must by definition be something wrong with the draw process. In others words it isn’t random.

Yes, that’s theoretically possible – but bear in mind lottery companies put an awful lot of effort into ensuring their draws are random.

By all means fire up your Excel spreadsheet, plug in all the past results, and make charts of hit frequency. If you find that kind of stuff fun.

(No offence intended – I’m a maths and probability geek!)

But please don’t be fooled into thinking this kind of analysis will increase your chances of winning the lottery.

It won’t do your chances of winning any harm to play this way, it just won’t improve them any either.

For more help with winning and real stuff you can do to improve your odds, get my free lottery tips course.

Every day I see another crazy claim about how certain results can never happen on the lottery. Or how you can avoid unlikely combinations, and other such total rubbish.

Well stick this story in your pipe and smoke it all you sellers of those crazy lottery systems!

Same Six Numbers Two Lottery Draws In A Row

On 6th September the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 were drawn on the Bulgaria lottery.

Then, the very next draw on 10th September exactly the same numbers were drawn again!

Eeeek! Impossible craziness right?

But the draw was live on Bulgarian TV. And it wasn’t one of those computer based draws, it was a normal lottery draw machine with balls tumbling around in a drum.

So did Derrren Brown fix the result? Is it some mass conspiracy to undermine trust in the Bulgarian lottery? Have aliens landed and taken over Bulgaria?

No. No. And probably not.

So How Can This Happen?

Let’s flip the question and look at it this way.

If it was impossible for the previous numbers to be drawn again, would that be a truly random lottery draw? If number 4 was less likely to come out because it appeared last time, would that really be random?

Think carefully here.

Randomness can look very odd sometimes. Especially to our highly ordered, pattern loving brains.

The truth is that it’s perfectly normal for things like this to happen when something is totally random.

It is theoretically possible there is something very wrong with the set of balls used. But a lot of checks and measures would have to fail for that to be the case.

Yes, Svilen  Neykov (Sports Minister) was right to order a review. But don’t be at all surprised to find the review finds nothing at all out of the ordinary.

What Can We Take Away From This?

If you look hard enough for patterns in past results, you will find them. But analysing past results will not help you predict lottery numbers.

(If you enjoy analysing lottery results and playing around with spreadsheets, that’s cool with me. I quite like a spreadsheet myself. But please try and avoid jumping to the wrong conclusion and making claims that simply aren’t true.)

UPDATE: The commission concluded their investigation and found no evidence of fraud or manipulation, and no wrongdoing. Surprise!