But the lesson there
Is not so much to beware of lotteries as realising that you can't swing the odds in your favour?

Nothing wrong IMO of punting a couple of quid on the lottery each week in the (remote) hope your numbers come up.

But the nature of lotteries (total stakes vs prize fund) is such that even if you covered every eventuality, and even if no-one else played that week, you're on a loser.

The only way it could work is buying up a proportion of tickets and hoping that a combination of the numbers you have chosen comes up - shame that your uncle had to find out the hard way that if they don't, you lose, and you lose big.
(Capo, Tue 12 May 2009, 14:16, 1 reply)

This must have already been
answered - but how many ticket combinations are there in the uk lottery?
(feedingtimeatthezoo day 1 of his bikini diet started, Tue 12 May 2009, 14:51, closed)

There are
49 numbers and 6 balls, so that's 49^6 combinations. Which is 13,841,287,201 (13.8 Billion) combinations.

So at £1 per ticket even if you won the recent £100M Euromillions you'd still have lost £13.7 billion. Even if no-one else won.

Of course, there are also repeated categories in there (i.e. the 13.8Bn includes 123456 and 654321 as seperate combinations). So it's probably closer to a mere few billion combinations. I'd give you a better answer but I'm at work, sorry!
( uberdeity Wondered why Owen Lars knew of the term "hell" on, Tue 12 May 2009, 16:25, closed)

Close
but you aren't predicting all 49 numbers, just 6 of them.

Could explain it but it's already been done better than I could do it here:

playlotto.org.uk/lottery/uklottery_odds.html
(Sathington Willoughby, Tue 12 May 2009, 17:03, closed)

123456
Is just as likely to come up as any other set. It's got nothing to do with the numbers printed on the balls, just a combination of six balls at random.

*Edit* I have missed the point somewhat.
(dozers, do fuck off ur a nob m8, Tue 12 May 2009, 20:13, closed)