Dear1 Dear2

We have been buying 4D for quite some time now, since our ROM day. We began with buying our wedding cert number. The wedding cert consists of 6 numbers, abcdef. We decided to 2 sets of numbers, abcd and cdef. And we bought $1 big for 3 draws a week. That meant $6 a week. Well, it seemed like a rather large extra expense, so we changed our strategy and bought our house number instead. This amounts to just $3 per week, much more affordable. So far, we have not struck any 4D with our house number yet but our marriage cert number did appear before… after we stopped buyng it. Grr…

Here, I would like to do a simple analysis for our philosophy of continuing to buy 4D. First of all, let me quote the prize table that can be obtained from the Singapore Pools website.

So you can see that if we bet $1 big for each draw, we can potentially win $2000 if the number comes up as first prize. Therefore, if we continue to buy $1 big for each draw, we can potentially participate in (2000/3=) 666.67 weeks. If we divide by 52 weeks a year, that’s (666.67/52=) 12.82 years. This implies that we can continue buying $1 big for 3 draws a week for 12.82 years in the hope of striking 1st prize at least once within this time period. This is of course making the assumption that the cost of 4D tickets does not increase and the top prize also remains unchanged. Additionally, we can also break even if we manage to strike at least a second prize within 6.41 years, or at least a third prize within 3.2 years. Well, that sounds comforting enuff, knowing that we can afford to wait for more than 12 and a half years and still break even on our 4D investment.

Let’s take a quick look at ibets. The number that we’re buying falls in the category of 4 different digits. So for a $1 big ibet winning 1st prize, we get $83. Hmm… Doesn’t sound like a lot. This means that we can buy my number for (83/3=) 27.67 weeks on ibet and break even with a top prize win. That’s only about half a year! But then, we need to factor in that ibet allows us to increase our chances of winning by 24 times. Looking at this in another way, it means that we’re buying 24 different numbers every draw with each set of number costing (1/24=) 4.2 cents each! In the end, the winning prize to cost ratio is the same as before ($83/4.2cents=2000).

But if we consider it carefully, each draw there can be only 1 winning number. But if you buy 24 numbers, only 1 will be the winning one. Meaning that, potentially, we can win a maximum of (83*83=) $6889 if 1 of our 24 numbers win the top prize every draw for 83 draws. If we consider the case without ibet, this is equivalent to winning 3 top prizes and 1 second prize over 2000 draws. Which one is more achievable? You be the judge. For us, we believe buying ibet is not to our advantage, so we shall stick to just buying regular bets. Or maybe switch to $1 small to increase our break even deadline. When will we finally win some prize?

-Dear1

Since we’re on the topic of 4D, let’s drown our sorrows in this song.