How does the lottery work?
Most people over 18 will have played the lottery at some point in their lives, but do they know how lotteries actually work?
Lotteries in the UK date back to the 16th century, and haven't changed much in essence.
Players enter by paying a small fee and choosing their numbers from a pool, then the winning lottery numbers are picked at random.
If the numbers you picked match those that are revealed, then you win a prize.
This is obviously a simplified version of what a lottery is, but the key theme remains in even the biggest lottery in the UK.
How does The Health Lottery work?
The Health Lottery's main
Big Win
game works by players paying £1 to select five lucky numbers of their own choosing or five random numbers from the Quick Pick option.
The aim is to match the numbers drawn on the main £1 lottery draws held on Tuesday to Saturday each week with a jackpot of £25,000.
Every £1 play for a weekly Wednesday draw will also enter the player into a free prize draw for a cash prize of £100,000. And on Saturday the jackpots total a whopping £500,000!
These free prize draws also take place following the main lottery draw each Wednesday and Saturday.
In The Big Win, there are 50 balls available in the lottery draw (numbered 1-50), meaning it offers better odds of winning the top prize than the National Lottery.
Find out more about how The Health Lottery works by reading our
Player's Guide
, where you’ll find all the details needed to play.
You can also play
All or Nothing
, where you win the £25,000 jackpot by matching all your numbers... or none of them! It's the lottery game with the best odds in Great Britain! There are two draws a week, on Tuesday and Friday.
And if you don't want to wait, there's always
QuickWin
, where there is a £25,000 jackpot to be won every three minutes!
All of these draw games cost just £1 to play.
The Health Lottery gives over 20p from every £1 spent to health-related good causes, which enables you to help fight health inequality across Great Britain.
How does The National Lottery work?
The National Lottery follows the classic lottery format, with players selecting six numbers and a bonus ball. The aim of the game is to match these numbers to the lottery balls that are randomly selected by the lottery machines.
These machines randomly push out numbered lottery balls, one at a time, from a pool of 59.
This means there are nine more balls in the National Lottery than in the Health Lottery, which significantly lowers your odds of winning the jackpot.
A ticket to play the National Lottery costs £2.
Much like The Health Lottery, the National Lottery gives a proportion of the money it raises to charitable causes.
How do postcode lotteries work?
Postcode lotteries work by players paying a small fee to enter a weekly or monthly draw that selects postcodes at random rather than numbers, then the players in those selected postcodes win a cash prize.
These are subscription lotteries, so they take money from you on a regular basis – you can’t just buy a one-off ticket.
Because postcode lotteries are based on addresses, you will have to share your winnings with anyone else who plays with the same postcode as you.
So, if you live in a rural area this could work to your advantage, but if you live in a city or other densely populated postcode, then you may have to split the winnings with lots of other players, and get a much smaller slice of the pie as a result.
How do lottery syndicates work?
If you don’t want to play the lottery by yourself, then you may want to consider joining a lottery syndicate.
This is where you join together with multiple other players, pool your lottery ticket money and then purchase as many lottery tickets as possible with the agreement that you’ll split any winnings equally.
In theory, this gives you a better chance of winning a lottery jackpot, but remember you will have to share the winning jackpot with the other people in your syndicate.
