Also play infrequently when big jackpot if I can be bothered but yes statistically it's a waste of time but I get suckered by wanting the freedom that an excessively large amount of money could bring.
Interesting factoid about number of balls in the draw and odds. The Irish lotto when it first started was a 6 ball draw from 36 possible balls. Top prize at the time was £250,000. Statistically there are almost 2 million combinations of 6 balls from 36 numbers which means that if the jackpot rolled over enough say 4-5 weeks then it would be possible to buy every combination and be guaranteed a return. This is because the ticket price at the time was 50p a line
Some Polish guy had this figured out and was ready waiting for the jackpot to reach the relevant size which it did at some point . He had assembled a team of people who sent into action and they began buying tickets in the thousands. This flagged up in the national lottery office computers as some shops that normally did no more than a few pounds worth of business were suddenly selling thousands and they tried to stop it (not sure how - read link for more info )
Anyway lo and behold they bought maybe 80% of the possible combinations by the time the day had rolled around and had managed to get the 6 numbers in amongst them. They just hadn't banked on two other people winning it as well so they had to split the jackpot. But once they collected all their match 5,4,3 tickets they came out £300,000 on top.
Then the Irish lotto added 3 more balls and that opportunity never happened again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Lotto
goto 'History of Lotto' for detail
