5th Prize pays more than 4th Prize in Australian Saturday Lotto Dec 19, 2009

[Colin Fairbrother]

The numbers drawn for Australian Saturday Lotto were 2 3 5 7 9 23
with supplementaries 26 and 41.

I play 18 lines costing $11.00 every Saturday from my online program
http://LottoToWin.com which ensures all integers are used with no
repeat paying subsets and coverage maximized. I happened to get the
Three plus a Supplementary, the 5th prize, noting that four of the
prize numbers were in the lower quarter when the pool of 45 integers
were looked at in numerical order.

Looking up the payouts I was surprised to see that 4th prize paid only
$24.75 whereas normally it is around $48.00 and it was less than my
payout for 5th prize of $26.10, which was down from the usual $39.00.

The obvious explanation is in the numbers that people play favoring as
they do the lower numerical order integers and those under 32 as in
birthdays.

As a percentage of the total prize money is allocated to each prize
category an abnormal number of wins for each category will result in a
lower payout as shown in the table below:

Prize Winners Payout Avg Win's Norm Payout
1 27 $148,148 5 $900,000
2 124 $6,943 60 $15,000
3 3,876 $420 1,165 $1,500
4 113,840 $24 60,000 $48
5 173,761 $26 142,500 $39

Just another reason for making sure all the integers are in your
playset.

Colin Fairbrother
http://LottoToWin.com