Massive R100 million Lotto jackpot this week – these are your actual chances of winning
After a slew of Lotto draws with no winner, the National Lottery Jackpot is sitting at a massive R100 million, which will be up for grabs on Saturday, 3 August.
The R100 million lotto draw would be the second biggest Lotto payout in South Africa’s history, topped only by the R110 million payout in January 2018, which was split among four winners.
The biggest lottery payout ever was a R232 million Lotto Powerball payout in 2019. Powerball winnings are typically significantly higher than the standard Lotto, with a high degree of turnovers due to the smaller chance of winning.
According to Lotto operator Ithuba, the latest jackpot follows 25 rollovers with no winner.
The odds are not in your favour
While there is a high degree of excitement and hope every time the jackpot hits record numbers, this should be tempered with a much-needed reality check on the actual chances of winning.
The standard Lotto is “easier” to win than the Powerball, in that it carries a higher chance of hitting the winning combination of numbers.
But the actual odds of winning the Lotto are so slim that you are 20,000 times more likely to be born with an extra toe than you are to choose the winning numbers.
The odds of you joining this list of instant multi-millionaires are infinitesimally small – 1 in 20,358,520, to be precise.
For the Powerball, the odds are even worse, with over 42,375,200 different combinations that one can play when choosing 5 out of 50 numbers and 1 out of 20 numbers.
To put these extreme numbers into perspective, your odds of being struck by lightning in South Africa are 1 in 350,000, according to the South African Weather Service (SAWS).
This means South Africans are 58 times more likely to get struck by lightning than they are to win the standard Lotto jackpot – and 121 times more likely to get struck than winning the Powerball.
Never tell me the odds
The South African lottery comprises 52 balls with a draw of six, putting the number of different possible combinations at 20,358,520 – which is where the 1 in 20,358,520 odds come from.
These odds are the same for each lotto draw, which occurs twice per week.
While you may think that if you play twice a week every week, your odds go up significantly, the rules of probability are unfortunately not in your favour.
This is because each lotto draw has its own independent probability. In other words, the odds of your ticket this week winning the jackpot are no greater than the odds of next week’s ticket being a winner.
Playing more frequently, however, can increase your chances of winning; yet each additional draw only increases your odds of winning by the smallest fraction.
For example, if you play from the eligible age of 18 until you hit the South African life expectancy of 65, you will have 47 years to play.
With two draws per week and a total of 104 per year across 47 years, you would have 4,888 opportunities to play.
The math says that assuming you don’t miss a single draw, your chances of losing would still be 99.975%.
Consider this: if you were to buy one lottery ticket at each draw, you could expect to win once every 195,755 years – or every 3,011 lifetimes (using the average South African life expectancy of 65 years old).
Bad gamble
The realities of the Lotto are often met with indifference.
For many, a R5 purchase for even the slimmest chance of becoming an instant millionaire is worth it – and a fractional percent chance of winning is still higher than a 0% chance if they don’t play at all.
But in the end, the Lotto is a gamble—and one of the worst bets you can make.
The Lotto and Powerball prize pools are calculated at 50% and 45% of total sales, respectively – which means for every R1 you spend on the game, you have a chance to get 50 cents and 45 cents back.
The Powerball’s prize pool has actually dropped over the years, and was recorded at 48% back in 2018.
Regardless, this means that there is an effective 50%/55% loss on what you pay.
This is more commonly referred to as the ‘house edge’ in most casino games, which shows how much the casino – or in this case the Lotto – is guaranteed to make on your spending over time. Effectively, the profit made per bet.
For games like roulette, the house edge is much lower – around 5% – while games like blackjack and craps can be under 1%. Slot machines carry a wide range, but can be as low as 5% and as high as 20%, depending on the machine and game type.
While betting on everything to score a win is not a good tactic in any gambling venture, with state lotteries, it is particularly egregious.
State lotteries are money-making ventures, and the South African Lotto is no exception. The FAQ says that the Lotto generates revenue that goes to various charities which assist the poor. Ironically, however, it is largely the poor who spend money on tickets, trying to escape poverty.
No matter which way you look at it, it’s just a bad bet – and it’s been that way for hundreds of years.
As the Lotto runners themselves state: play responsibly.
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