What are the Odds?

What are the Odds?

Winning the jackpot of the Euromillions lottery isn’t easy. You need to correctly pick 5 main numbers from 50 and 2 Lucky Star numbers from 9 in order to scoop the top prize, and the odds of you doing this are just 1 in 76,275,360. That sounds difficult, and to illustrate just how slim the odds of winning are, many people have compared them with the odds of being killed in a number of unlikely ways. For example, someone living in the UK...

• Has a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of being killed by lightning.

• Has a 1 in 3,000,000 chance of dying from food poisoning.

• Has a 1 in 2,000,000 chance of dying by falling out of bed.

Such miserable statistics might make it look as if you have more chance of dying in a grisly fashion than winning the lottery, but in actual fact this observation is deceiving, because the published odds of winning Euromillions (1 in 76,275,360) relate to your chances of winning one particular draw.

Grisly death odds don’t relate to any particular day. For example, someone in the UK has a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of being killed by a lightning strike. But that is over the course of an entire year. With 365 days in a year, the odds of anyone being struck by lightning on one particular day are actually 1 in 3,650,000,000.

The same principle applies to food poisoning and falling out of bed. The odds of you dying from food poisoning on one particular day are 1 in 1,095,000,000. And the odds of you dying after falling out of bed on one particular day are 1 in 730,000,000!

When you compare Euromillions odds with these specific odds for various grisly deaths, you can see that you’re actually far more likely to win a lottery jackpot this Friday than you are to meet your maker in any spectacular fashion.

Of course, that still doesn’t mean you will win by any means, and the odds of you doing so are still incredibly slim. But it’s nice to know that the odds aren’t nearly as frightening as many media pundits would have you imagine!