What's New On These Pages: November 2015

Next month: November 2015

• Wednesday 28th October
  Bought one additional ticket online for next Saturday's main Lotto single rollover draw.

• Saturday 24th October
  It turned out that the free Lucky Dip I "won" last Wednesday didn't even match a single number in tonight's draw, proving predictably worthless as a so-called "prize". Although you can pick which of the next 2 draws (Sat or Wed) that your free Lucky Dip is played in, you have to do this prior to the draw where you "win" your Lucky Dip. This is because as soon as that draw takes place, the exact draw your Lucky Dip is played in is determined immediately based on your prefs at the time of the draw and the free ticket play is fixed to that date.

  This means that, say, you allocate "next Saturday" to play the Lucky Dip and then you "win" a free Lucky Dip on a Saturday draw, then your Lucky Dip will be played in the following Saturday draw. What you can't do is go into your prefs on the Sunday after you "won" the Lucky Dip and change the prefs to "next Wednesday" to force your Lucky Dip to be played on the next Wednesday draw. That prefs change only applies to future Lucky Dip tickets and not ones you've just "won". I suspect this is to stop what I was planning: alternating the day allocation to extend the Lucky Dip beyond one week.

• Sunday 18th October
  Bought one additional ticket online for next Wednesday's main Lotto double rollover draw. It's the first time I've "only" bought two tickets (rather than three) in total for a double rollover draw in a long time.

  Added more code to handle the output of "quintuple" for 5 consecutive rollover draws, just in case the jackpot isn't won next Wednesday and Saturday :-) It's interesting how the first three draws have all had purple (50-59) balls and all three have resulted in unwon jackpots. It does lend credence to the theory that purple balls don't have as much coverage as other colours as a fair chunk of players will have stuck with their old (non-purple) numbers.

• Wednesday 14th October
  Bought one additional ticket online for tonight's main Lotto rollover. I thought long and hard about this and decided on two changes in my additional ticket policy for rollovers:
  1. I will no longer buy 2 additional tickets online for a double rollover, 3 additional tickets for a triple and so on. I will buy one ticket via Direct Debit (the same ticket I've always had) and then only one additional ticket online for any rollover regardless of the number of times the draws have rolled over. The logic behind this is that it's now 3.22 times harder to win the jackpot than before, so this implies there'll also be three times as many rollovers (i.e. more rollovers than normal draws).
  2. I feel that there will be a load of people who will stick to their old numbers (I have on my first ticket), so the second ticket should probably include a number between 50-59 to try to win the jackpot without sharing it. I added 10 to one of my numbers on my "old" second ticket to bring it into that range and I deliberately avoided the number 57 (Heinz varieties - people might go for that...).

  One tip here - you really don't want to be buying main Lotto tickets offline any more (you should have stopped already long ago when the £20 grand raffle started). If you buy offline, there's big disadvantages:

  • You might forget to buy a ticket completely - online purchases can be made automatically via Direct Debit if you are willing play the same numbers for every draw.
  • You might lose your ticket or get it destroyed (e.g. in a washing machine) and I bet no-one ever writes their name and address on the back (so anyone who finds it can claim the prize it's won - though if it's a large prize they will know which terminal sold it, so you might get rumbled there).
  • You might forget to check your main Lotto numbers and if they're Lucky Dip, you'll not have memorised them either.
  • The BBC don't show the £20 grand raffle numbers - you can only check them online (and if you can go online, why didn't you buy the ticket online as well?).
  • You might not realise that a 2-match wins a free Lucky Dip and even if you did, you may forget to go and claim the Lucky Dip for the next draw.
  • Camelot will e-mail you if you win a prize via an online ticket and will credit your account with the winnings automatically - neither of these things happen if you play offline though.

  Had a bit of trouble with the raffle numbers tonight - I'd stupidly looked for "prizes of" as the string to indicate the number of raffle prizes and raffle prize amount on the results page. This worked on Saturday because there were plural numbers of raffle winners but tonight's only had one millionaire raffle winner, so the string didn't match. I corrected it to "prize.* of" and then the code correctly updated the raffle data files and generated the pages with the raffle numbers on them.

  Bought one additional main Lotto ticket online for next Saturday's main Lotto double rollover draw. Interestingly, both last Saturday's and tonight's main Lotto draws had purple (>=50) balls in them, which may go towards explaining why neither draws' jackpots were won (people sticking with their old - aka <= 49 - numbers).

• Tuesday 13th October
  Finally automated the grabbing of the Millionaire Raffle data from the official site for the new main Lotto. I now have a data file for that Millionaire Raffle and then revamped the code that read the "normal" raffle numbers to be able to also read the new data file.

  The script that grabs the raffle data was also modified to be able to grab either the millionaire or normal version of the raffle data. It's all on one page on the official site so using last Saturday's draw as an example, I just filter out the 45 lines containing the raffle numbers and then "head -25" to get the millionaire data and "tail -20" to get the normal data. It's obviously slightly trickier than this because I have to remove a lot of HTML cruft from each line as well.

  I'm now scraping the Match 2 Lucky Dip figure from the official site and including it in my data file (I manually transcribed it for last Saturday's draw). This should have now completed the revised auto-scraping for the new main Lotto.

• Sunday 11th October
  Got up this morning and at least Camelot had finally updated the main Lotto number of winners/prizes - it was definitely after 1.30am at least. Belatedly realised that the prize calculation formula had changed of course and it's much worse now - the percentage of the prize fund allocated to 5-match and 5+bonus is now disgustingly low and it's now hugely tilted (83.2% - by far the highest ever) to the jackpot tier.

  I initially got the reverse sales calculations wrong for the new prize structure because although my formula worked with just adjusted tier percentages, I completely misread the game procedures. It isn't 47.5% of ticket sales that gets allocated to the total prize pool (that's the first figure I read and was close to the percentage from the old structure) and the 3-match prizes are not deducted from the prize pool calculations before the variable tier prizes are involved (they used to be with the old prize structure).

  It turns out only 17.82% of ticket sales are now allocated to the total prize pool (this is excluding the 3-match prizes remember) and there's a separate 6.93% of sales going to the Millionaire Raffle prizes. I'm assuming the remaining 22.75% go into the Reserve Fund, though the rules aren't super clear on that.

  Added in the 2-match tier on the individual draw page with very little fanfare. I don't state it "wins" a free Lucky Dip ticket for the next draw and I also refuse to include the "winners" in the grand total number of winners because that figure is for winners of actual cash prizes, not this bogus free Lucky Dip nonsense. Remember that the "prize" does not apply to this draw, but to a future one, so should not be included in any prize totals at all for this draw.

  Camelot's mathematics for their Saturday main Lotto prize breakdown table are now so appalling, the table has four glaring errors in it:

  1. The Match 6 "Prize per winner" was £5,279,697, not £0.
  2. In the Match 6 row, 0 "No of winners" multiplied by £0 "Prize per winner" somehow becomes £5,279,697. This has been 100% incorrect for all unwon jackpot prize breakdown tables for as long as I can remember. It's done to incorrectly boost the Totals line figure at the bottom of the table and is frankly outrageous.
  3. The Match 2 "Prize per winner" is stated as a "Free Lotto Lucky Dip", but this is for a future draw and no "Prize per winner" should be stated for this draw (i.e. at best it's "£0" for this draw).
  4. Somehow and completely incorrectly, the Match 2 "Prize per winner" is implicitly set to £2 for this draw. This means that apparently the 1,519,930 free Lucky Dips for a future draw are worth £3,039,8690 for the Prize Fund for this draw - unbelievable!

  All of this dubious mathematical bamboozling allows Camelot to incredulously claim that there were £38.2m of cash prizes awarded in yesterday's draw. The real figure is actually £29.9m - the rest is just awful smoke and mirrors from Camelot. I've no idea how they can get away with blatantly lying about prize pool figures!

• Saturday 10th October
  Didn't get around to coding the data file for the £1m raffle prizes yet, so just transcribed them from frozen stills of the TV show (which crazily listed them in random order and in separated batches of 5, 10 and 10 - go figure). I kept manually checking the official site's draw history index page (which is the one my scraper checks too), not realising that Camelot had put up the winning numbers and raffle ticket numbers only on their results page. Yep I had to manually transcribe the 20-grand raffle prizes from that page because of this.

  Worse was to come as midnight passed and no prizes/winners for the main Lotto had been published by then - not good for their revamped main Lotto draw! It admittedly didn't help that the TV shows aired at 10.00pm and also refused to air the Thunderball live - they'd have had time if two awful "performances" from some song and dance troupe hadn't been aired.

• Friday 9th October
  Somewhat belatedly started coding for the additional 10 balls for tomorrow's main lotto draw and the other various game changes that are happening. In no particular order are these tasks:
  • Change maximum ball number from 49 to 59. (Done)
  • Generate light purple ImageMagick miff-format balls for numbers 50 to 59 (with and without bonus ball message). Proved a bit tricky until I installed a couple of fonts on my Linux desktop and activated them with "xset +fp". (Done)
  • Change ticket encoding to include numbers above 52 (upper and lower case A-Z only cover 26*2 numbers of course) - now using "3"-"9" to mean 53-59). (Done)
  • Adjust Number Palace stats for the numbers 50-59 so that after tomorrow's draw, it won't claim those numbers haven't appeared for 2,066 consecutive draws :-) (Done)
  • Main Lotto results auto-grabber must now allow balls 50-59. (Done)
  • Update strategy to mention balls 50-59 (I'd say include at least one for a while, but with Lucky Dip and first-time players, 50-59 will get coverage quickly anyway). (Done)
  • Display 2-match info, which "wins" a free Lucky Dip ticket. I won't be including the 2-match "winners" in the total number of winners though because it isn't a cash prize and any actual monetary win would be in the next draw and not this one. I really am annoyed with Camelot claiming that this is a "prize" when it clearly isn't. It's extremely devious and highly unethical to do this in order to claim there's "more winners" and "better odds of winning", when in terms of cash prizes, it's far, far worse odds/number of cash winners now. (Done)
  • Auto-grab 2-match "winners" figure from official site. (Done)
  • Use a data file-based Millionaire Raffle system rather than horribly hard-coded HTML of winning tickets that I've previously used. I already have a data file for the 20-grand raffles, so the code just needs to be dual-purposed. (Done)
  • Update wheeling challenge to deal with 59 balls. (Low priority task)
  • Update draw simulation software to cope with 59 balls, 2-match "winners", £2 for a ticket nd even the £25 3-match prize that was introduced ages ago (I'd set the limit to £20 thinking that 3-match couldn't possibly go higher...). (Low priority task)

• Monday 5th October
  Bought an additional ticket online for next Wednesday's main Lotto single rollover draw. Yes, it's my last ever additional ticket for the 49-ball version of the game.

Previous month: September 2015

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