An incredibly complicated guest blog by Gareth Hill, makes sense if you're a bit mental...
It is safe to say the Biteback team was caught up in the lottery fever this week with a 13-person strong sweepstake to try and win the £161 million Euromillions rollover. Our hopes were high and hope turned into success as we brought home the huge payout of £2.90…or -£23.10 if expense of the tickets is taken into account. Never listen to the idea of an intern (me).
Of course the big prize has been won by former psychiatric nurse Chris Weir and her TV cameraman husband Colin and we (not at all begrudgingly) wish them the best of luck with it. So around the office we were discussing what they should buy with their new fortune and came up with a brilliant solution, buy more Lottery tickets.
Sure, at first this may seem weird but take the National Lottery in the UK, for example, the chances of winning is 1 in 13,983,816. Typically, a triple rollover would generate over this amount so if you bought every combination at £1 a ticket with your Euromillions winnings you would be guaranteed profit. Easy money, right?
Well, you would run the risk of another person also winning which would half the amount of money you would win. Then again, every combination of numbers would mean the jackpot plus every possible £10 ticket win (which with 246,820 different combinations of this would earn nearly £2.5m) and every larger winning combination on top of that which would mean even more money coming in (13,545 different possible 4 number tickets, 252 different 5 number tickets and 6 different 5 plus one bonus number tickets).
In addition of course, the National Lottery gives to charitable causes and you are now rich so can probably afford some creative accountants to turn your lottery addiction into a tax right-off maybe.
All sounds good but then comes the difficult part, you may be rich but you don’t control time, and if you could purchase one ticket per second, 24 hours a day, it would still take 81 days to buy all the combinations. Of course you could employ some trusted temps to do it for you, but travel expenses might cut into the profit!
It’s doable however and we hope Mr and Mrs Weir consider this as part of their new ultra-rich lives as it would be an interesting experiment in idiosyncrasy…or if this is all too complicated they could just purchase a money printing factory.