How to win the lottery: The numbers that come up most, what number of tickets to purchase, the draw with the most effective odds and the luckiest space of the nation revealed

Thirty years ago today, presenter Noel Edmonds was entrusted with a rollover machine, £6million in jackpot cash – and one of the most important roles in TV history.

Almost 12 months after prime minister John Major had promised to introduce a ‘National Lottery‘, the night of the first draw had arrived. So frenzied was the build-up across the UK that seven million tickets were sold within just 12 hours of the game’s launch.

That evening, as Edmonds drove the all-important cargo to the studio in a high-security vehicle, 22 million Britons were perched in front of their TV screens.

Some 40 per cent of the UK population tuned in to the first draw – many of them hoping to scoop the life-changing winnings.

In the end, no millionaires were made that night: seven players chose the same winning numbers, taking home £839,254 each. But that all changed on week two, when four lucky ticket holders shared the £7million jackpot, each scooping £1,760,966.

It proved to be the start of a long list of newly minted Lottery millionaires – not to mention multi-millionaires – with more than 7,400 created in the three decades since that first draw.

Over the years, the public appetite for overnight fortune has shown no sign of waning – with more than 30 million adults still playing the Lottery each year.

But the big question, of course, remains: how can you boost your chances of winning?

You’re more likely to be hit by a plane

Sadly, the odds of scooping the jackpot are lower now than they were when the National Lottery first launched.

Back then they were one in 14 million, today they’re one in 45 million. Much of that is due to the decision in 2015 to increase the number of balls featured in the draw from 49 to 59 in 2015 – creating more frequent, cumulative rollovers.

It means you are more likely to be hit by a part of a plane falling from the sky (the odds of that are one in ten million). But, on the bright side, you are more likely to scoop the jackpot than be crushed by a vending machine: the chances of that are just one in 112million.

Perks of the ‘thoughtless routine’

While many people swear by their own lucky numbers, the chances of winning a big prize this way compared with using randomly generated numbers are fairly even. In fact, a recent Lottery survey showed that 49 per cent of winners scooped the jackpot via a (very) lucky dip.

In other words, using the same numbers consistently – however special they may feel – doesn’t increase your odds of hitting the big time. Each Lottery draw is independent, so it’s like tossing a coin – previous flips don’t affect future ones.

The only way that picking the same numbers every week may play in your favour is through the ‘thoughtless routine’. As the Lottery is a numbers game, someone who buys tickets for 25 years is (perhaps marginally) more likely to win than someone who can’t think of numbers every week and so forgets to buy them or gives up. This may explain why syndicates comprise around 20 per cent of Lottery winners.

The benefits of ‘bunching’

Many players like to space their numbers evenly but there’s no evidence that any particular set of six numbers will boost your odds.

For this reason, it’s worth thinking about ‘bunching’ your numbers – picking 15, 16, 17 etc. While the space between numbers makes no difference to the likelihood they will get chosen, most people tend to space them out evenly across the range available – meaning if you bunch yours together and win, you are more likely to keep the jackpot to yourself.

Why 37’s the lucky number

Some numbers certainly come up more frequently over particular periods – although, as mathematicians will testify, this is random. Those determined to find a pattern may be interested to know that, in the last nine years, the numbers 37, 52 and 58 have come up most frequently (drawn between 113 and 115 times) while 30 and 18 have popped up only 84 and 86 times respectively. This year, the most frequent main balls are 11 and 48 (both drawn 15 times) and the most frequent Bonus Balls are 17 and 28 (both drawn five times).

What about buying lots of tickets?

This was a tactic deployed by two Chinese bank workers in 2007 when they ‘borrowed’ nearly £5million from the state-owned Agricultural Bank of China to play the lottery over a series of weeks. Their logic? That their giant spend would boost their chances of winning so exponentially that they would win big, replace the stolen cash and still have lots left over to enjoy.

Alas, it didn’t work out like that. Although, in theory, greater numbers of tickets should boost your chances of winning, this only really works in smaller set-ups like a local raffle. In those formats, there is a set number of tickets and buying more of them ups your chances – if there are 100 raffle tickets and you buy five of them, you have a 5 per cent chance of winning compared with a 1 per cent chance of winning with a single ticket.

However, when it comes to lotteries, there aren’t a set number of tickets sold but rather a series of numbers that are drawn. This means that – in theory – any number of people could pick the same series of numbers and so split the prize.

This knowledge came too late for the Chinese bank workers who ended up on the run before being arrested, jailed and subsequently sentenced to death.

Trust your pet chicken…

Former winners include Sheffield resident Ray Wragg, who used to choose his numbers by writing down car number plates at random and using them for the lotto draw. It worked: in 2000 his method scooped Ray, now 81, and his wife Barbara a cool £7.6million.

While not quite the same eye-popping win, another player, Billy Gibbons, scooped £1,297 in 2003 after playing five numbers that his rescue chicken Kiev – subsequently renamed Lucky – had pecked into his calculator. All five came in, leaving Billy a feather away from the £9million jackpot.

…But not your psychic

In one draw in early 1995, 127 winners were dismayed to discover that, despite choosing all winning numbers, their prize amounted to less than £8,000 each.

The reason lay in the fact that one of the TV teletext services had a ‘psychic’ predict the lottery numbers before the draw – three of which proved to be correct.

Mathematician Norman Fenton, of Queen Mary University of London, explains: ‘Many thousands of players that week used those numbers specifically as a result of seeing the teletext article. And this had a ‘double whammy’ effect on the jackpot winners.’

Effectively it diluted the overall cash prize because Lottery rules state that every player who gets exactly three numbers correct is guaranteed a £10 prize, and it also lowered the odds of hitting the jackpot.

‘Instead of using all six, many jackpot prize winners had three of their own ‘lucky’ or ‘preferred’ numbers and additionally used the three successful ‘psychic’ numbers,’ Norman explains. 

‘The probability of selecting three correct numbers from 46 is much higher than the probability of selecting six correct numbers from 49 (one in 15,000 compared to one in 13 million). So given that a large number of people used exactly the three correct psychic numbers it was inevitable that there would be a much higher number of jackpot winners than normal.’

Try Wales for a millionaires’ paradise

Unlikely as it may seem, some areas do seem luckier than others. The South East of England boasts the highest number of lottery winners, with 975 individuals bagging £1million or more. But, when you factor in population figures, players in the North of England and Wales seem to fare better when they buy their tickets. Wales has had 389 winners of £1million or more, which adds up to 125 lottery millionaires for every one million people – higher than anywhere else in the UK.

But don’t expect a win to solve all your problems

While 97 per cent of millionaires say they are as happy or happier than before their win, one of the Lottery’s first big jackpot winners, Mark Gardiner, thinks the old adage that money buys you happiness is all relative. He and his business partner, Paul Maddison, ran a small local glazing firm together, in Hastings, East Sussex, when in 1995 he scooped a whopping £22,590,829.

‘The analogy I like to use is that whatever was going on in your life before – all the little seeds that are planted – the win pours water on them all and up they all sprout,’ he told the Mail earlier this year. ‘I always say to people that before I won I had a box of problems, but the box was quite small. Lottery enabled me to shelve that box of problems, but then someone came along and gave me a much bigger box.’