These 27 tickets guarantee a win on the Lottery

Matt, congratulations for making the least depressing video on YouTube that involves a middle aged, unshaven, man comparing lottery numbers on his couch in a dark room with his dog for company.

It would have been hilarious if 1,000 mathematicians all read the paper and bought the tickets; won the big prize; then had to split it...

You actually won two tickets. The ticket [8, 14, 18, 20, 40, 44] has 8 and 20 in it.

Back in the early 90's when NZ lotto was only 6 numbers from 40, I spent waaaay too long working out how to manually fill out tickets, to guarantee 3 numbers for $10. I mean, every combination was accounted for.... I filled it out to plan , and got 3 numbers.... I won $5... Half my spend, but I'll always remember how proud I was, that I worked it out! And now I watch your videos, because math is fun to work out 😂

Don't gamble is solid advice.

Actually, you won two lucky dips, on 12 22 32 33 56 57 and on 8 14 18 20 40 44. (Looks like you forgot to mark 8 on your tickets.)

“It’s okay, I have a system.”?? How many better opportunities could you have to say “It’s okay, I’m a standup mathematician.”?

@11:10 I thought that "random numbers live" is a proud tradition on this channel. If anything, compared to "Generating π from 1,000 random numbers", "2,000 throws of three-sided coins." and "Matt flips a coin 100 times.", these 7 numbers from a gravity pick lottery machine are nothing to write home about. By the way, I personally think that air mix machines are more fun to look at. But I'm not from the UK so I don't have much reason to complain about what the UK National Lottery does.

I remember when the lottery changed from 49 to 59 and it was marketed as more numbers to choose from. The odds went up considerably and there were many times when there were no wins.

The non-zero amount of Skylab content in this video pleases me! I love how elegant the maths is for making this work with 27 tickets.

Wow, almost 8 years since you covered the lottery on the main channel! Love when we advance the original plotlines like this.

Quite interesting! It does raise two questions though: (1) How many tickets will you need to be sure you have at least 3 matching digits? (2) And how do their likelihood of profits compare?

For what it's worth, Matt, a piece of paper with only tons of numbers is exactly how many many people do their lottery tickets. Sadly, most expect the clerk to input the numbers, so I'm happy to see those little scantrons in use :)

You bought 27 tickets and won 1 extra ticket. Now that's what I like to call PROFIT!

Imagine the universe in which he just happened to win the jackpot and had to figure out how to turn that much money back in to the channel

I remember when the 6/49 came to Canada. They ran a huge ad campaign on, "How are you going to choose your lucky numbers?". They had a Mom say its the ages of her children, a guy using the years his parents were born and the year of his first car. You get the picture. A year later, they ran a campaign in which people in the ads were congratulating their friends and family that "their lucky numbers" were drawn, and the friends and family hitting their heads on the table etc because they lapsed in buying a ticket. Evil

Came for the maths, stayed for the dog.

I imagine all of his video ideas start with him getting a notification and exclaiming "New maths!"

The true irony is if you had played the numbers on the paper you would have made 4 matches of two

Moral of this story: Even if you're doing lots of fancy maths, the lottery is statistically a losing bet.