Lotto!

I had a winning ticket for the National Lottery at the weekend. However, I’m not going to be giving up my job any time soon as it wasn’t the £6,000,000 jackpot prize but a somewhat more modest £38 for getting 4 balls correct. In fact, the ticket was something of an impulse purchase as I needed some coins for the children to throw into a collection bucket at a fireworks display and it was a throw up between a Lucky Dip and a Mars bar. I decided that the 1 in 13,983,815 odds of becoming an instant millionaire was probably going to do me more good than the 250 empty calories in a Mars bar. As it is, the £38 is a pleasant surprise although possibly a somewhat paltry return for the 1 in 1,031 chance of picking 4 correct numbers.

I’ve never really been into gambling. Many years ago I used to do 8 from 10 on the football pools but the entertainment was in trying to predict that weekends scores rather than the thought of winning the jackpot (although that is actually the point of it). One of my uncles is a habitual punter on the horses. He actually has an encyclopaedic knowledge of horse racing and can easily pick out most of the winners on a race card. What always befuddles me is why he then goes and puts his money on a bunch of donkeys because “the odds are good”. If the favourite is odds-on to win it’s usually for a good reason but he will be taken in by betting on “Destined For The Glue Factory” because 100-1 looks enticing. For those unfamiliar with racing odds, 100-1 means that for every £10 staked, you will lose £10.

 When the national lottery started I did buy a few tickets. Partly this was the novelty factor but also because the first ever draw was on the night of my wedding. Several wedding guests bought tickets for us as it seemed fateful that our most important day should result in a moment of fortune. Unfortunately, the universe doesn’t work like that and the tickets merely ended up with the confetti on the floor. The way the lottery was run to begin with annoyed me as they encouraged people to make sure that they had their "special" numbers on every draw as “It could be you.” In fact it was probably going to be one of 13,983,814 other people but that didn’t stop them appealing to a gamblers fallacy.

I lost interest in the lottery very quickly and, although I did administer the works lottery consortium for a while, I didn’t buy any tickets for myself - except for the odd lucky dip when I needed change for something. In fact, I was rather taken with the attitude of one of my colleagues who would buy a ticket on Friday night but not look at it until Monday morning as he would then have the possibility all weekend that he didn’t have to go into work. I suppose this is a sort of Schrödinger’s cat in reverse but £1 for a weekend’s pipe dream isn’t  bad value for money. As for me, I can think of better ways to spend £1 – just not on Mars bars.