- Superstitions have grown around lucky NS&I Premium Bonds monthly draws
- Many bondholders believe that some bonds are more likely to win than others
- But if the prize draw relies on luck, why do some bonds seem more likely to win?
Premium Bonds are surrounded by beliefs about how lucky – or unlucky – the individual bonds are, but are some really more likely to win the jackpot than others?
The bonds are National Savings and Investments’ most popular savings deal, and there are more than 120billion of them in existence.
The way they work is that each bond is entered into a monthly lottery. Rather than paying interest like a standard savings deal, Premium Bonds offer a chance of winning prizes from £25 to the coveted £1million jackpot, of which there are two every month.
This element of chance, combined with the fact the bonds have been around since 1956, has led to a number of superstitions about some bonds being more lucky than others.
Luck of the draw: NS&I’s wildly popular Premium Bonds monthly prize draw picks winners from millions of individual bonds, but why is it that some letters and numbers seem luckier?
Common beliefs are that new Premium Bonds are more lucky than old ones, or that certain areas are more likely to win than others.
These myths have been debunked by NS&I, which says the prize draw is totally random, and that if an area has more jackpot winners then it must have more bondholders.
But are some Premium Bonds more lucky than others – and is there a way to work out if you have a ‘lucky’ bond or not?
This is Money put this theory to the test, looking at the bonds that won the £1million jackpot in the past two years.
Each bond is given an 11-digit code, made up of nine numbers from 0 to 9 and two letters from A to Z.
Given that the Premium Bonds draw is meant to be random, you would assume that winning bonds had a fairly even distribution of these letters and numbers.
But you’d be wrong.
In fact, in the past two years some letters are far more likely to feature in winning bonds than others.
For example, the letter A, I, O U and Y did not appear in any jackpot-winning Premium Bonds during the period.
But the letter B appeared in 9 per cent of all winning bonds, making it the luckiest letter to feature.
The letters V, P and F featured in 7 per cent of the Premium Bonds that won a £1million prize.
The chances of an individual number appearing in a winning Premium Bond is much more even, as there are only 10, rather than 26.
The unluckiest number was 7, appearing in 24 per cent of winning bonds – despite 7 being a very commonly-chosen ‘lucky’ number.
The luckiest number was 3, appearing in a whopping 40 per cent of winning Premium Bonds.
At face value, this gives some bondholders reason to feel a bit glum. If NS&I really does work out winning bonds at random, why do some letters not feature at all in the past 24 months of Premium Bond £1million prize winners?
The answer is probability.
Each number has a 90 per cent chance of appearing in any winning Premium Bond number, and each letter a 7.6 per cent chance.
Over 48 Premium Bonds draws, any number has a near certainty of appearing, and each letter has a 97.8 per cent chance.
But the probability of a letter not appearing at all in 48 Premium Bonds prize draws is still 2.14 per cent, which explains why some of the recent winning bonds have ‘unluckier’ letters.
An NS&I spokesman said: ‘There are many myths around Premium Bonds, including that some numbers and letters are luckier than others, but the truth is that each £1 Bond has an equal chance in the draw each month.’
NS&I uses a computer called ERNIE to work out the winning Premium Bond numbers randomly, and is vetted every month by the Government Actuary’s Department to make sure it is doing so fairly.
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