Not everyone who wins the UK lottery draw wants to give up his or her job. For example, Kevin Halstead from Lancashire recently won £2.3 million but decided to continue driving a bus for a living. He said, “I don’t want to pack my job in. I asked my boss for time off, a month maybe two, but I don’t want to cut myself off from my friends and I really enjoy my job.” Kevin will still buy his daughter a pony and move back into the village where he was born.

Players who participate in the British National Lottery must imagine winning the jackpot like Kevin but what are the chances of doing so?

The odds against winning the top prize works out at 1 in 13 983 816, about the same as becoming an astronaut! It is true that you are more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 2.32 million). If you could buy £100 000 worth of tickets each time the prize money rolls over, mathematician Bill Hartson believes you would have a 1 in 14 chance of winning the jackpot.

Of course there are other prizes than the jackpot to be won. In each weeks draw it is said that around one million players win a prize of some amount. To take home the top prize you need to match six numbers between 1 and 49 but there are prizes available for five, four or just three numbers. The amounts available range between £100 000 and £10 and the odds of winning one of these drops to between in 2.3 million and 1 in 56.7. The chances of winning any money at all stand at 1 in 54.

Playing through a syndicate is probably the more efficient way to join the UK lottery draw. Any money won by a syndicate is distributed among its players, which of course increases the chances of any one player receiving a return. In any case syndicates tend to win one in four of the jackpots.

Search the Internet and you will find several ways to improve your chances in the British National Lottery but perhaps the most promising is the Elottery scheme. The programmes advantages are largely mathematical. For five pounds a week each player gets forty-four entries into both the Wednesday and the Saturday draws. Each syndicate comprises forty-nine members. The players each choose five numbers, which are entered into the lottery, the sixth number for each entry is taken from the forty-four remaining numbers and added to the five already selected. This simple model improves the chances of winning a prize by 702% to 1 in 13.

Of course the British National Lottery is still a lottery but there do seem to be ways to increase a players chances of winning money. Joining a syndicate certainly seems to do just that. There are indeed better ways to play the UK lottery draw.