I’m three times more likely to father identical quads than win the £58m. But dammit, I’ll buy a Lotto ticket one last time

FOR me and many like me, tomorrow will bring a Herculean test of willpower. With a record jackpot on offer, predicted at £57.8 million, will I have the strength to adhere to the resolution I made three months ago, when I promised I would never be mug enough to buy a lottery ticket again?

I blush to admit that for 21 years, from the National Lottery’s inception in 1994, I paid my stupidity tax every week — first forking out £1 for a ticket each Saturday and then buying another when they introduced the Wednesday draw three years later.

In all that time, I never won more than a tenner (£9, actually, since Camelot never returns the stake) — and that only once in a blue moon. Yet even when the company doubled ticket prices in 2013, bringing my weekly outlay up to £4, I went on buying my two lines of numbers each week.

Of course, I knew that my chances of winning the jackpot were vanishingly small. To be precise, they were one in 13,983,816 — or rather smaller, a chap in a pub once told me, than those of stopping a random stranger in the street and correctly guessing their mobile telephone number.

Probability

Another friend put it like this. Imagine a row of 10p pieces, stretching the 208 miles from London to Manchester. Each coin is laid flat on the road, touching the next, while on the underside of one of them —no one knows which — someone has drawn a cross with a felt-tip pen.

Our chances of winning the lottery jackpot from each entry, my mate told me, were considerably smaller than turning over a single one of those coins and finding that it’s the one with the cross on it.

Yet on and on I went, buying my tickets, deaf to reason, common sense and the mathematics of probability.

A part of the problem, keeping me hooked, was that I was one of those idiots who chose the same numbers each week. These were family birthdays, unoriginally enough. Leave aside how foolish it was to pick birthdays, since so many others have the same idea — also limiting themselves to numbers between one and 31 — that my chances of having to share any jackpot were greatly increased.

What made it particularly hard to give up, as others who choose the same numbers every time will have found, was the terrible fear that my regular selections would come up just as soon as I stopped buying tickets. Indeed, I knew the agony of the blow in those circumstances would be quite as extreme as any exhilaration I would have felt from winning.

With that in mind, I went on playing and losing, telling myself that someone had to strike it lucky, so why not me? Meanwhile, my chances of scooping the big prize would be infinitely greater if I entered the draw than if I didn’t. And anyway, wasn’t £1 a week a small price to pay for hope?

So I continued to delude myself for 21 years, as my weekly £1 stake turned first to £2 and then £4. That was until October last year, when Camelot changed the rules, telling us to pick our six numbers per line from a total of 59, rather 49.

Even then, that poisonous cocktail of hope and fear might have kept me playing. But there was something about the deeply disingenuous way in which the company announced the new rules — ‘the exciting changes i ntroduced to Lotto’, as it described them — which convinced me that enough was enough.

‘Extra numbers to choose from’ the company trumpeted on its website, as if, out of the generosity of its heart, it was offering a fantastic new bargain to its punters.

‘Exciting jackpots,’ it went on. ‘Bigger rolling jackpots means [sic] there’s more to play for.’

All right, I thought, I may be a fool — fool enough, anyway, to have played the lottery for the past 21 years. But I’m not quite such a moron as to fall for this insult to the intelligence. That was the last straw, and I haven’t bought another ticket since.

‘Extra numbers to choose from’? As even I could see, the honest way to put this would have been: ‘ Even smaller chances of winning!’

‘Bigger rolling jackpots’? Here’s the honest translation: ‘ Your chances of scooping the jackpot, always infinitesimal, are now so non-existent that weeks will go by without a winner!’

Optimistic

Indeed, tomorrow’s jackpot has reached its record peak solely because no one has won the wretched thing for 13 consecutive rollovers. This has taken it above the £50 million, at which the rules say it must be distributed to those who select the most winning numbers, whether or not anyone picks all six.

Yesterday, as a service to lotto-addicts who want help to quit, I did a bit of number-crunching of my own to work out the full implications of the new odds against winning the jackpot. Or rather, being a total innumerate, I persuaded my mathematically minded mate, Chris, to do the sums for me in the pub (and you can address any queries to him).

As to the raw figures, there is no dispute. Camelot itself admits that by adding ten numbers to the ‘exciting choice’, it has lengthened the odds of winning from one in just short of 14 million to one in a staggering 45,057,474.

According to Chris’s brilliant maths, this means that you are less likely to win the jackpot than to pick the winning four horses in the Grand National, in the correct order, for 17 years in a row (this assumes a field of 40 horses per race, in which each has an equal chance of winning).

As for that row of 10p pieces on the motorway, each 24.5 mm in diameter, you can now extend it to four times the distance from London to Manchester, and you’ll still be in with a better chance of picking the one with the felt-tip cross on it than selecting all six winning numbers in the lottery.

As Dirty Harry didn’t exactly say, you’d surely have to be one hell of an optimistic punk to feel quite that lucky.

Yet even as I write, I feel myself weakening at the thought of that £57.8 million.

Bitterness

Yes, I know I’m four times more likely to be killed by a falling plane part than to win that jackpot — while it’s well over three times more probable that I’ll father identical quadruplets.

I know, too, that the lottery has been aptly described as the most effective means ever devised of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich.

Week after week, after all, millions of hardup pensioners shovel their precious pounds into the pockets of Camelot executives and the brimming coffers of such ‘good cause’ institutions as the Royal Opera House.

It’s not even as if I have a clue what I’d do with that sort of money if I won. I have a horrible feeling it would ruin my life, causing no end of bitterness in my family. I’d probably end up divorced, like so many other lottery winners, or demanding welfare benefits after blowing the lot within a year, like the couple from Guernsey you might have read about this week.

And yet, and yet . . . I’ve always been a lucky sort of a chap. Take the Grand National in 1967, when I took the advice of a horse-mad schoolmate, who told me the secret of winning was to bet on the animal least fancied by the tipster in the Daily Express.

One tip in particular caught my attention — and I quote f rom my admittedly unreliable memory: ‘Not a hope. Even in a race noted for surprises, this horse will not finish.’ I duly put my ten bob on Foinavon — which romped to victory at 100-1, after falling so far behind the rest of the field that he missed the pile-up at the fence that now bears his name.

Isn’t it just possible that Lady Luck will attend me again tomorrow? And what if my regular numbers come up, and I haven’t entered the draw?

Dammit, I’m going to break my resolve — and buy a ticket for one last time. If I’m not here next week, you may safely assume that I’ve won.