Sir, – Allow me to answer Brendan Chapman's question about the Lotto odds (Letters, November 10th).
For the National Lottery jackpot, one must match six numbers picked from a pool of 47 numbered balls. As the order of the balls drawn doesn’t matter this makes our life easier and I shall ignore the other Lotto games such as Lotto Plus to make it even easier.
So based on those numbers and having done the maths, if one buys a single Lotto line, the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 10,737,573. Perhaps one wishes to improve the odds however, and so play additional lines. Well, to have approximately a 50/50 chance of winning a jackpot one would only have to buy 5,368,790 lines, which at €2 a line would cost €10,737,580.
But let us say one wishes to win without losing any money. As the jackpot is capped at €19,060,800, one could buy 9,530,400 lines, which would give about a 89 per cent chance of winning the jackpot.
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– Yours, etc,
PAUL LAVIN,
Harold’s Cross, Dublin 6W.