Thinking of playing the lottery?
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Perhaps this might give a sense of perspective.
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'Casinos typically pay out more than 97 per cent of money staked. With Premium Bonds you actually get to keep your stake, plus an average of 3½ per cent, in prize money per year; small wonder the Government doesn’t promote them. The lottery payout? Fifty per cent.
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'And these pathetic returns are so skewed to the jackpots that the average player receives far less than that, even over a lifetime. If you bought ten tickets a week for 50 years, your chances of winning one jackpot in that time would be less than 1 in 500. You would almost certainly lose about 80 per cent of your cumulative stake.
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'To represent the vanishingly small chance of a lottery jackpot in the game of roulette, you would need to build a wheel with close to 14 million compartments; to scale, the wheel would be bigger than London — too large, in fact, to fit inside the M25.
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'If you were picking a card, the pack would be three miles high. And so on. It could be you. But it goes to good causes, right? Well, if you want to give 28p to a good cause chosen by the lotterycrats, buy a £1 lottery ticket. Or you could give £1 directly to a charity of your choice — that’s £1.28, with gift aid.
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'Nor is the lottery much of a tax. The operator, Camelot, raised £4.77 billion in 2004-05, of which it and the retailers shared equally the last 10 per cent: £477 million. The Inland Revenue, over the same period, raised £380 billion at a cost of less than 1 per cent of the money raised. '
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