Daily Mail

WAYS TO MAKE YOUR LUCKY NUMBERS COUNT FOR MORE

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■ MAKE sure your numbers add up to between 90 and 160: numbers within this interval account for more than 70 per cent of the successful five-number sets of EuroMillio­ns.

■ BUNCH your numbers close together, too — say 15, 16, 17 and so on. While the space between numbers makes no difference to the likelihood they will get chosen, most people tend to space them out evenly across the range available — meaning if you bunch yours and you do win you are more likely to have your jackpot to yourself.

■ THE most common EuroMillio­ns numbers drawn as main numbers are 23, 19, 44, 50 and 5, while the most common Lucky Star numbers are 2 and 8.

■ WHAT about buying lots of tickets? While in theory that should boost your chances of winning, it only really works in smaller set-ups such as a local raffle, where there is a set number of tickets and buying more of them ups your chances.

When it comes to lotteries, the maths gets more complicate­d. That’s because there aren’t a set number of tickets sold, but rather a series of numbers that are drawn, which means that — in theory — any number of people could pick the same series of numbers that you have, and so would split the prize with you.

In reality, the vast majority of EuroMillio­ns jackpots are won by a single ticket holder — although in August this year the £54million prize was split three ways between players in the UK, Belgium and France.

Nonetheles­s, factor in the dizzyingly long odds against picking the full set of correct numbers, and it makes calculatin­g the effect of costs sunk on the chances of winning a fiendishly complex exercise.

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