It’s not often the photos of lottery winners contain quite so much flesh on show. But Margaret Dallard and partner Brian Tucker are not your typical lottery winners. In fact there was plenty more flesh displayed from many of those present at the celebration Margaret and Brian held to mark their good fortune in picking up a £240,928 win on the UK Lotto.

Whilst designer clothing is not at the top of the pairs shopping list, they plan to pay off their mortgages and give money to the eight children they have between them.

But they both plan to continue working at their jobs with Dungeness Power Station in Kent. “Nobody at work knew we were naturists…” said Brian. I have I feeling the secret is probably out now..!

The couple played just three lines a week, mostly made up from family birthdays. Of course playing birthdays is not going to give you a better chance of winning as the wise players here will know. But it does give you a reason to adjust the way you play - unless you want to share your jackpot with lots of other lottery winners it makes sense not to play too many birthdate numbers.

What do you think? How many birthday numbers (1-31) do you play in a line? How many birthdate numbers in a line would it take before you rejected a randomly generated entry? Add your comments below.

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I’m often asked for lottery advice - and usually advice as to what numbers to pick!

Obviously nobody can pick winning numbers in advance, that’s fundamentally impossible. But what you should be doing is everything you can to maximise your chances of winning. And top of that list is one of the most frequently overlooked pieces of advice I can give you… play the right lottery game.

Now the right lottery game for you will depend on:-

• what country you live in
• what games are available
• AND what your goals are in terms of winning

Obviously we all want to win big, right? But what most people really want is ‘life changing’ big. To some people that may be as little as a few thousand pounds/dollars/Euros. To others it may be a lot more. But you need to know this otherwise you can’t make the best decision as to what game to play!

Once you know ‘how much’ will do it for you, then for every lottery game available to you find a) the typical jackpot amount, and b) the odds of winning (check your lottery companies official website for these details).

Now you can wisely pick the game that gives you the best chance of winning the life changing sum of money you’re aiming for. Why play a game with jackpot odds of 1-in-72 million if there is a game with odds of 1-in-5 million that would change your life if you actually did win it?

That little gem of lottery advice alone can instantly double your chances of winning - and maybe even give you up to TEN TIMES the chance. It will cost you nothing to apply it, and goes on working forever! Please add your comment below to let me know how much this improved your winning chances.

If you liked this tip, please use the ‘Share This’ link below to help other people find it.

For more tips on maximising your winning chances, make sure you get our free lottery tips course (oh, and do subcribe to our feed to make sure you get future gems of lottery advice).

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The Australian Powerball jackpot once more went unclaimed which now means there is a very nice jackpot of $50 million dollars this Thursday - the largest ever jackpot for an Australian lottery.

So are we about to see the richest ever Australian lottery winner?

The highly popular Australian Powerball game was made to pay out very big prizes - and very big jackpot winners. Previously, the largest ever lottery wins have been more than $30 million only 4 times. And that’s since the game launched back in 1996, making the draw this week a very special event for all Australians.

Who were the other big winners?

Three of those huge jackpots were winners from the Powerball game, with one each from Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. Oz Lotto provided the fourth biggest win.

Oz Lotto has also created the biggest ever Australian lottery prize to date. And it happened just a few weeks ago. A very nice 1st division prize of $47 Million was claimed on 29 April 2008. It was shared by just 2 winning tickets, both bought in Sydney’s western suburbs. One was by a young man who claimed $24 Million, the other a syndicate of laboratory workers - who after sharing out the prize money still got $1.5 Million each to celebrate with.

If you want to join the fun for this historical draw there is an Australian Powerball syndicate you can join online. It’s open to players all over the world, so a great choice if you can’t get a ticket because you don’t live in Australia! And as a syndicate it goes without saying that you also get a better chance of winning too - particularly important if you want to play powerball draws which are tougher to win to start with.

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Is George trying to look young and cool again..?

George W. Bush often uses the phrase “like totally”. No, like he does, like totally!

Surely this annoying phrase is only used by teenagers, isn’t it?

Well actually a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Liberman, found that “like totally” is widely used by men and women of all ages. And incredibly middle-aged men use it most. So say what you like about GW, he isn’t cool, or even trying this time :-).

This belief that if something feels new to us then it must be new to everybody else too, is actually known as the infrequency illusion. We have a natural tendency to overestimate our own personal experience and not step back and look at the big picture.

This is why the less wise lottery player often convinces themself that they have discovered a significant secret to beating the lottery.

Here’s what I mean.

Take wheeling systems. And especially wheeling systems sold by people who like to use lots of testimonials to prove how effective their ’systems’ are (whilst being careful not to make any claims they would have to legally substantiate…).

The conclusion the buyer is supposed to reach is that wheeling improves your chances of winning because look at all the people who have won using it. The reality of course should include looking at the much larger group of people who have not won whilst using the same system.

Another example.

It’s quite common to hear people say:

“don’t play consecutive numbers such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - they will never win”.

But step back and look at the bigger picture and you’ll find plenty of other combinations that have never won either. That’s because it takes a lot of draws to average out a jackpot win for each of 10’s of millions of possible results.

Even the longest running lottery in the world (yes, the Netherlands!) has had less than 15,000 draws. And most lotteries have had less than a few thousand draws!

But of course, those other results that have never won don’t get mentioned, because the numbers are not as visually pleasing to the eye.

So next time you see something that looks significant about the lottery results, step back a moment and consider if it only looks significant because you don’t have enough information. Because maybe the infrequency illusion has just paid you a visit.

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[Q] I’ve been analysing all my past lottery results over the years and whilst I know these things are supposed to be random, there is a pattern. Some numbers have definitely been drawn more often than others, and some have definitely appeared in the jackpot combination more than others. Should I play those numbers?

[A] You’re absolutely right.

Do you remember rolling a dice at school and charting the results? You tallied up each number as it was rolled, and then drew a little bar graph of the results. And the graph made pretty much a straight line proving that all the numbers had the same chance of being rolled.

Or did it?

Actually your graph was pretty wonky - oh yes it was! But don’t take offense, I’m sure you drew yours just as well as I did ;-). But all of our graphs were actually pretty wonky, and wonky in different ways too. If we took all our results together and drew another graph then we’d have one that was smoother, but still not perfectly straight.

We all get caught up in what we think we learned about ‘averages’.

But the fact is if you take any set of past results from any lottery for any period in time, you will find the same thing. Some results appear more or less often than others - a wonky graph. And that’s because this is exactly the sort of result that is entirely normal for a random process. If it were not possible for this to happen then the results would not be random.

With randomness if you actually repeat the ‘test’ enough times then every possible set of results would happen. Not just every result, but every different wonky graph for each set of results you pull out. So everything from never winning a single thing on the lottery, to hitting the jackpot every single draw for your whole life!

This is how random works. Just because the current state of play is ‘less likely than the true average’ does not mean there is anything unusual going on.

The weak point in the chain here is actually our brains - they love to see patterns in randomness. That’s the nature of our brains, we just can’t help trying to make a nice comfortable order out of things. And when it happens to be numbers we’re trying to make order of we’re even worse than ever!

So the real question here is not which numbers to play as a result of all this analysis, but whether the past results have anything useful to reveal to us in the first place. And the fact is, they don’t.

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