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My old, occasional sparring partner, and much-missed from the airwaves broadcaster, Vincent Browne, used to (and presumably, still does) strenuously oppose the existence of the national lottery. “A tax on hope”, he would call it, claiming that it convinced worse off people to throw money they could not afford at tickets every week, in the vain hope of one day striking it lucky.
My own view was always different: There’s nothing wrong with hope. Most weeks, at least once, when out walking the dog, I plan to myself what I will do with the jackpot, when I inevitably win it. The biggest imaginary problem is always figuring out how to apportion it between relatives, without causing a family row, and still having enough left over to justify spending an obscene amount of money on a new Aston Martin. (My calculation is that if you have €5m or less left for yourself, you can’t really justify the Aston. If you have more, then you can probably get it, and still live comfortably for the rest of your days).
But Vincent certainly does have a point: If you buy, as many people do, two lines on the lotto, and two on the euromillions, for every draw, then that’s pushing €30 per week. Over a whole year, it amounts to nearly €1,500. And despite that, your chances of ever winning a significant sum are infinitely small. If the Government were to announce in the morning a measure that cost families €1,500 per year, there would be mass civil unrest. The water charges, which produced more political unrest than most things in my lifetime, did not amount to that much.
And so, we turn to the Fine Gael TD for Kildare, Bernard Durkan:
Bernard Durkan wants an investigation into why the Lotto jackpot hasn’t been won for six months. pic.twitter.com/HaOiTCAzQ9
— colin coyle (@colincoyle) November 19, 2021
It’s one thing to have a tax on hope if the hope is at least even slightly realistic. Durkan’s point is that the present lotto system – with the increase in numbers to 46 balls – has made the prospects of winning the jackpot so remote as to undermine the legitimacy of the lotto itself. That is why he wants a couple of balls removed, to improve the odds.
And he’s right, you know.
In times past, a high lotto rollover jackpot was not a significant problem, because the chances were that it would be quickly won. But the current odds cap the jackpot at about 19million. The reason for this is that if you spent about 21million on tickets, you could purchase every possible combination, and win it. So, the jackpot can never go to a point where it would be profitable for somebody to do just that.
The result, however, is that the jackpot sits at that very high, very tempting level, every single week, and all the additional tickets sold become pure profit for the lottery operator. Would it not, therefore, make sense to have a smaller jackpot, and more frequent wins?
Here are the present odds of winning, courtesy of Gavan Reilly:
Not something you see every day: a Government TD seeking an ‘urgent investigation’ into the “unwinnable” National Lottery.
In Ronan Collins’ day the odds of any line winning were 1,947,792 to 1.
Now they are 10,737,573 to 1 – five and a half times higher. pic.twitter.com/LhhkeiPUr5
— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) November 19, 2021
In a country of five million people – only about half of whom will ever even buy a ticket, ten million to one odds are extraordinarily high. If you assume that somewhere between 2 and 3 million tickets were sold for every draw, or about five million lines, then that means that every draw has about a 50% chance of not producing a winner.
Given that even an average lotto jackpot – 2 or 3 million euro – is a life changing sum, surely it would make sense to reduce those odds to something like five or six million to one, and increase the chances of a jackpot winner in every draw to something like 80%?
Lotto defenders will say that the point of the Lotto is not jackpot wins, but all the money generated for good causes, and that higher jackpots generate more such money. And that may well be true – but most people who buy a ticket do not buy it to help good causes. They buy it, because, like me, the lotto is their best chance at retiring, buying that house they have always wanted, and not having to worry about work, or taxes, or any of that stuff.
It makes sense, morally, and in every other way, to increase their chances. Because at 47 draws with no winner, Vincent Browne’s argument that the lotto should just be done away with looks more, and more convincing.
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