Games and chance

The Games and chance tools take a game's official rules and work out what they mean in practice: how many entries a choice makes, what it costs and what each outcome pays. The first is the lotto wheel calculator, which covers the National Lottery's Lotto, Thunderball, EuroMillions, Set For Life and Powerball.

• Lines and cost: an 8 number Lotto wheel is 28 lines, £56.00 a draw at £2.00 a line.
• Prizes for your hits: how many lines land in each prize tier when some of your numbers are drawn, with the fixed prizes added up.
• Odds per tier: a Thunderball line wins something about 1 in 13 draws.

Every draw is a choice of numbers from a pool, so its odds are a count of combinations. Six numbers from 59 can be drawn in 45,057,474 ways, and a single Lotto line matches all six in exactly one of them. Lower tiers are counted the same way, which is how the operators' published odds can be reproduced line by line.

A wheel or a system only buys more lines. Each extra line costs the same and adds the same small chance, so the chance for each pound spent stays where it was. The tools show that arithmetic; they do not suggest numbers, and no set of numbers is more likely than another.

Every game covered here is for adults only: the National Lottery has a minimum age of 18, and so do the national games of the other six markets. In Great Britain the Gambling Commission licenses each game, and its licences are the source of every rule the UK pages use.

The pages explain how games work and what they cost. They do not recommend playing, staking more or choosing one game over another. Anyone worried about their gambling can find free, confidential help through the services the Gambling Commission lists.

Some tiers pay a fixed amount, such as every Thunderball prize and most Lotto prizes, so the tools can add them up before the draw. Others share a pool among the winners, and their amounts are only known afterwards, so those lines are counted but not priced. Even fixed prizes can be reduced in rare draws when the rules cap the total, which the pages state where it applies.

How each figure was checked against its source is set out in the methodology.