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What Are the Chances of Winning the Lottery?

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What are the chances of winning the lottery with 59 balls?

In October 2015 the national lottery in the UK increased the number of balls in the draw from 49 to 59, thus making it much harder to actually win the jackpot.

Previously, choosing 6 numbers from 49 would give you a 1 in 14 million chance of winning the lottery but now with the extra 10 numbers to pick your 6 numbers from, the chances have massively decreased to 1 in 45 million.

This increase in the number of balls and decrease in the chance of winning have been proven with the fact that the jackpot has continued to be an elusive prize that has not been won since the changes were made, contributing to a massive jackpot of £50 million + which could go on for a couple of weeks.

Tonight’s draw (6th January 2016) will be the 14th rollover jackpot – continuous rollovers since the new rules were introduced. This could trigger more people to buy tickets just because of the size of the jackpot which could then mean that more of the number combinations are covered.

The national lottery website says the following about the limit on the size of any rollover jackpot:

The jackpot can only stand at £50 million for two draws. If no one wins in the second draw, the full amount rolls down and is shared between the players in the next winning prize tier.

So it might be worth waiting to see if anyone wins the jackpot this time and if they don’t then there might be a great chance of winning more money with lower odds in the draw where the jackpot will be filtered down if no-one wins. This would be next Saturday 9th January 2016.

If no-one wins the jackpot on Saturday then the chances of winning with 5 numbers and the bonus ball are around 1 in 7.5 million which is almost twice the odds as winning the jackpot before the numbers were expanded to 59!

So if you want to know what are the chances of winning the lottery with 59 balls then I would say much better if you wait until the jackpot has to filter down!

Lottery and Sweepstakes – Possible Scams

Games,

Every day thousands, if not millions of people receive emails to tell them that they have won a bunch of money in an online lottery or sweepstakes competition. In most cases these lotteries or sweepstakes are competitions that the recipient of the email has ever entered. The lesson in this is beware of anyone that tells you by email that you have won money in a lottery. Particularly if you never knew that you took part.

Many of these scams ask you for your personal details and also maybe to send a cash amount to be able to release the funds to you. Whatever you do, don’t reply to these people. If you have not entered a lottery or sweepstakes then you are not going to win it and it probably does not exist.

The first thing I would advise you to do if you have received an email from someone saying that you have won money in a lottery and you are wondering if it could be true or not, is to google a key phase from the email – maybe they give you an email address to respond to – then google something like ‘lottery win’ and the email address. You should be able to bring up some results that show if this is a scam or not.

Nothing for life generally comes for free so remember this whenever you get any of these emails. If you really have won some money then no doubt they will try and contact you by other means, they will not just randomly email you and then give up. So, much as you might want it to be true, your best bet is just to ignore and delete these emails and never to give out any of your personal information to these people.