Tattslotto

Tattslotto is Australia's most popular public lottery, with up to 1 million people buying tickets every week. There have now been over 2800 draws, although since the 1980s they have had 2 and then 3 draws per week. Tattslotto has existed since 1895 and offers division 1 winnings of at least AU $1 million for winners, often $20 million or even $50 million for jackpots. Tattslotto is owned by the Tasmanian company Tattersalls, who also own most of Australia's next most popular lotteries, including Super 66, Oz Lotto and Powerball.

To play Tattslotto, you pick 6 numbers out of 45 numbers total.

The draw, telecast live on TV, selects 6 numbers + 2 supplementary numbers.

Division 1 prizes are for selecting all 6 numbers. Division 2 prizes are for selecting 5 numbers plus 1 supplementary. Division 3 prizes are for selecting 5 numbers. Division 4 prizes are for selecting 4 numbers. Division 5 prizes are for selecting 3 numbers plus 1 supplementary.

Prizes vary week to week, but in a typical week they might be AU $5 million for Division 1, AU $50,000 for Division 2, AU $3,000 for Division 3, AU $200 for Division 4 and AU $50 for Division 5. All divisions have "prize pools", and actual amounts won depend on how many people share it with you. Thus it is possible (and has happened a few times) that a worse division might be worth more in a given week than a higher division. Tattersalls takes a guaranteed cut, regardless of how many people win, as a percentage of the bets.

Tattersalls have also released the odds of winning, courtesy of their web site.

They are:

6 Winning Numbers 8,145,060
5 Winning Numbers + 1 Supplementary Number 678,755
5 Winning Numbers 36,689
4 Winning Numbers 733
3 Winning Numbers + 1 or Both Supplementary Numbers 297

In some weeks, with jackpots, it may be that you could put in multiple entries to get a guaranteed profit, so long as you are the sole winner.

Tattersalls also release information about previous draws to help people with "wheeling", to try to predict the next week's numbers.

In addition to manually choosing your 6 numbers, Tattersalls now allow people to pick more than 6 numbers (for an increased fee), they can do a "Quick Pick", where they are assigned random numbers, and there are a variety of other ways that people can play this particular lottery. Odds-wise, choosing options other than the standard 6 numbers increases your chance of winning.

Controversy

In the mid 1980s, a man claimed to have worked out a formula for predicting Tattslotto, and ran newspaper advertisements throughout Australia, claiming that if people paid him AU $10,000 each, then he would guarantee that they would win Division 1 Tattslotto. In the first week, he had 50 applicants, and they all shared the AU $3 million prize, earning each of them AU $60,000 on their $10,000 investment. He then appeared on TV show A Current Affair to explain his formula. The next week, he had 2,000 applicants, who each shared the AU $1 million prize, earning them each only AU $500. They complained that they had lost out, but he was quite correct that he had given them a return on their investment and had not breached any laws.

Tattersalls investigated the incidents, as both Division 2 and Division 3 were worth more than Division 1 because of this and it was making a mockery of their lottery. As a result, they discovered that the man actually had a person helping him who worked for Tattersalls that was taking measurements to help to predict the lottery, including measuring air pressure, wind, how the balls were placed and so forth. By applying physics formulae, the man was thus able to predict to a much higher degree of accuracy what the numbers were.

The man had not broken the law, however, although the employee of Tattersalls had breached his confidentiality contract and hence was fired. As such, Tattersalls bought 45 new balls and a new machine, and they go to much greater lengths to make sure that nobody can predict this again. They have also worked with the police and law enforcement to make it illegal now for someone to help to predict any gambling incident, and it now counts as the same kind of thing as fixing a horse race or other sporting endeavour.