Only the National Lottery itself sure to hit jackpot

Never mind tonight's roll-over Lotto jackpot. You can get odds of 1,000 to 1 against Clare beating Kerry by between 22 and 24 points in tomorrow's Munster football final - a potential £1 million return on a £1,000 stake.

In theory, anyway. Most bookies' shops have a cap on pay-outs, and a spokesman for the Paddy Power chain said it might look askance at investments of more than, say, £50 on such odds. Don't ask for a £1,000 bet on a 22-point defeat for Kerry, as a referral to a psychiatrist may offend, is the message.

But the point is, the chances of Clare winning by that margin are a lot better than the odds against you or I picking the right combination for tonight's Lotto, expected to be for a jackpot close to £5 million.

And yet, according to the National Lottery, 80 per cent of all Irish adults will have tried.

After five draws without one, the only sure winner is the Lottery itself. In the very week that RTE announced plans for an Irish version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, the Lotto has bounced back with the third-biggest jackpot in its history.

The biggest, £7.4 million, was shared in 1996 by Paddy and Mary Kelly from Cavan and an unnamed syndicate from Meath, while one anonymous winner in west Cork claimed £6.2 million in 1997. Roll-over precedent suggests that, given good weather today, about 1.7 million play-slips will have been entered by tonight.

None of them will belong to Prof Des McHale, mathematician and prolific joke collector. He has never bought a Lotto ticket and, having worked out the odds, has no plans to buy one in the future.

To the oft-quoted argument that an individual is statistically as likely to die in a plane crash as win the lottery, he adds that death in a plane crash is mathematically less probable than being "kicked to death by donkeys" (a calculation probably skewed by the growth in global air travel compared with a stagnant or declining world donkey population).

But his advice to Lotto players today is to pick numbers greater than 31, since many people use birth-dates and on low-number combinations there's a bigger chance you'll have to share the winnings.

You'll also definitely have to share if you pick straight lines of numbers on the play-slip. The vertical combination of 2, 10, 18, 26, 34 and 42 is the State's most popular, according to the lottery, followed by the vertical line 1 to 41 and the diagonal 5 to 40.

And if you have a winning combination including the numbers 4, 7 and 11, you can also expect plenty of company. That's according to Paddy Power, which offers 450 to 1 against anyone picking three numbers drawn, and says 4, 7 and 11 mean a pay-out of £600,000: "It's the name of the women's perfume, and it's a disaster for us every time it comes up."