It will be me

If a casino sees a punter who is card-counting at the blackjack tables, they will throw them out. They don't care if the system works or not but they hate people who try to use science to improve their chances of winning. The House must win.

I have set up my play tickets for this evening's UK National Lotto game (Sat Mar 22, 2025 and can guarantee that I will win. I have developed a system for doing just that. What I cannot guarantee, however, if how much I will win. I might not even win a cash prize, just a free ticket to play the next game. No matter because, using this system, I managed to make a profit on my games last year. I did well. A profit of £12 will not make a jot of difference to my retirement fund but a profit is a profit, and I am not complaining. The fact that I made a profit meant that I played my games for an entire year at no cost.

If you want to learn how my betting system works for the UK National Lotto game, read this article...

How to win a lottery

When I tell people that I have this infallible system, devised with the help of boffin mathematicians from the University of Manchester, they must think that either (A) I am bonkers, or (B) I have some kind of scam to sell. Form your own opinion. It is a game I play and I like playing it. The value to me, an occasional gambler, is that it improves my odds of winning and massively increases the number of times I can play for my money. As I said, I played for free last year and have retained the £12 I made in my player's account, where it will extend the period of play, add to my profit fund, or help to cut my losses.

To play the system I have created, I figure you need to commit something like £200-£300 potential losses in a year. If you do well, this commitment will allow you to continue to play for longer. If you do very badly, you might have to think about whether you want to commit more funds to continue playing.

It could be you

This video shows a 1994 TV ad for UK National Lottery

Why bother for so little return?

I can sometimes be a little impatient. If I thought it would be nice to enter Lotto every week, I could buy a £2 ticket once or twice a week (each Saturday and Wednesday), spending a total of £104 or £208 over the year. But why wait? I could just buy 52 tickets for a single week's game. That way I wouldn't have to wait for up to a year to find out if I had won and I would also have a better chance of winning (I think, if you are a mathematician, please let me know). I would know right away, as soon as the results were announced on a Saturday or Wednesday evening, shortly after ticket sales close.

However, if I am going to spend £100 or £200 per year on a lottery, I would like to find a way of improving my chances of winning. This is how I came up with my system. First off, I needed a set of numbers that would be most likely to get me a win. This was provided by New Scientist (UK) magazine, which published the results of some research by mathematicians at the University of Manchester in July and August 2023. They came up with a combination of 27 number series that which, if they were each entered into a UK Lotto game, would guarantee at least one win.

What I did was to take this number series, adapt it to my own unique set of numbers (with exactly the same chances of winning) and then made one further adaption. I only play Lotto using this system where there is a "must be won" game. This occurs if the jackpot hasn't been won for five consecutive weeks. It means that, if there is no jackpot winner in the "must be won" game, the total jackpot fund is divided among all the other winners. A three-ball win, which would usually mean a prize of £30, might be as much as £100, sometimes more. Two balls would normally win only a bonus ticket for the next draw but, in a no-jackpot must-be-won game, would win £5. All other prizes are correspondingly increased. Which means that, while there is no more chance of winning a prize, any prize won would be proportionally bigger.

That, then, is my system. Manchester's mathematician's numbers, adapted to create my own unique set of numbers, and then played only with "must be won" games. Last year there were 12 "must be won" games and I played over 350 lines in these and the follow on games for which I had won a free draw ticket. During the year, I even won a £30 prize from one of these free tickets. More importantly, as I said, I made a total of £12 profit on the year. This means that I entered Lotto 350 times in 2024 at no cost over the year.

If you play the UK Lotto (you have to be a UK resident over 16 years old) or any other lottery, only do so if you can afford to lose.

If you want to test out the system at no loss, or play the system without spending any money, just obtain the numbers from the New Scientist article (you will have to subscribe or you could obtain a copy of the article from an academic or free lending library that offers such a service) and check each week to see if you (would) have won. You can also look through the results history to see how much you would have won, or lost, if you had entered these numbers last year.

Whether you gamble your money on Lotto or not, happy gaming.