HK-LOTTO is the lottery from 
The answer is very easy: STATISTICS
There are certain ways to get further information that can help us select the best option.
To do this we should assume some things like the lottery is long term and that all the parameters are fixed which is not true since every week it changes, but it will be precise enough to give us a good idea of our real chances of earning money.
It is not very difficult to calculate, and I will give you some tools that can help you.
For this post I will use the numbers from the last lotto.
First of all, we need to calculate the expected payment of the ongoing lottery, to do so we just need the prices and our winning percentage.
The expected payment of the lottery is the product of your win chance and the average of all 10 prizes.
| # | Prizes |
|---|---|
| 1st | 226239 BUDS |
| 2nd | 113074 BUDS |
| 3rd | 56514 BUDS |
| 4th | 28234 BUDS |
| 5th | 14094 BUDS |
| 6th | 7047 BUDS |
| 7th | 3523 BUDS |
| 8th | 1716 BUDS |
| 9th | 858 BUDS |
| 10 | 406 BUDS |
| Long term average earning | 45170,5 BUDS |
In this case 45170,5 x 38.43% = 17360,4956. But to get that percentatge i had to buy 34500 tickets, so I should expect a loss: 17360,4956 – 34500 = -17139,5044
If this number is positive, you should definitely play the lottery.
What I do is play with the numbers before buying any tickets. And I check the number of tickets that get me the highest expected payment.
Well I took advantadge of the low pot. Not many people are entering the lottery so I easily got 38.43% of the tickets. And that means that I can expect to win nearly 4 of the 10 prizes.
For each prize they randomly pick a transaction number from the total, and it turns more than 1/3 of the total are mine. Then I only have to calculate my chances to win one of the four best prizes which would make me earn more than I spent (the fourth prize doesn’t cover my investment, but combined with many others it does so let’s keep it like that).
To calculate these chances, we use a Combinatorial calculator. I recommend this one.
Now the important part (it is important to understand the logic behind):
I expect to win easily 3 prizes (because i have more than 1/3 of all entries), so I calculate how many possible combinations in groups of 3 exist that make me loose money.
Any combination including at least one of the top prizes makes me earn money so i calculate the possible combinations between the remaining 6 prizes.
Here all the possible combinations in groups of 3.
Then I take the diference between the total combinations in groups of 3 and the ones that make me loose money and divide it for the total combinations in groups of 3.
And I get the chances to earn money if I get 3 prizes. The thought behind that is easy it counts my chances of getting a combination of prizes that are bigger than my 34500 BUDS investment.
Not bad right? Playing in a situation where i have 83% of chances to get my money back. But the things can get even better, in the same exact way we can calculate our chance to get the money back in case we earn a different amount of prizes. Here are the results:
We can see that if I get 7 prizes it is a fact that I earn money. And that is exactly what happened :
I won all these prizes and i got a total of 218.251 BUDS. Earning me a 183.751 BUDS in profit. Of course i got really lucky here, because winning 7 prizes is an extreme success with a tiny chance, but I did everything possible to maximize my chances and you should do the same!
PD: REMEMBER! : this is not financial advice, and this is not a fixed sistem, we took some risky assumptions, THERE IS ALWAYS RISK TO LOOSE YOUR MONEY, but playing the HK-LOTTO like this you ensure you know how to properly calculate if you have real chances to get your money back.
Also bear in mind that the amount of tickets to dominate the lottery is low for now, but if it keeps growing it will be harder to get huge chances to win.
