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As we have come to learn very well over the past few years, some people really do have all the luck when it comes to playing the lottery.
This means that the rest of us really have no shot of actually ever winning the lottery, no matter how many tickets we buy or systems we try.
There is one way to guaranteed a win, however, if you have access to the UK National Lottery.
Two mathematicians, David Cushing and David Stewart of the University of Manchester, determined earlier this year that all you need to do to guarantee a win playing Lotto over there is to buy 27 specific tickets – this despite there being 45,057,474 possible winning number combinations.
“The proof of their idea relies on a mathematical field called finite geometry and involves placing each of the numbers from 1 to 59 in pairs or triplets on a point within one of five geometrical shapes, then using these to generate lottery tickets based on the lines within the shapes,” Matthew Sparkes of New Scientist wrote in July of 2023. “The five shapes offer 27 such lines, meaning that 27 tickets bought using those numbers, at a cost of £54, will hit every possible winning combination of two numbers.”
Of course, a “win” could mean as little as a free entry into the next drawing, which could yield no prize.
Which is why, despite the fact that they would have won $2,300 if they had played one night during the writing of their research paper, they have never played the lottery.
As they pointed out to Sparkes this week, using their system will produce wins, but it is also a great way to lose money.
“They were very happy to tell me how much they’d lost basically,” Cushing said about all of the excited emails he has received from people who have used their system.
In fact, “If every single man, woman and child in the UK bought a separate ticket, we’d only have a quarter chance of someone winning the jackpot,” he added.
Still, if you want a guaranteed win so you can enjoy the thrill of victory and don’t care if you make a profit on it, their numbers are listed on page 18 of their research paper.