South Africa
Lucky South African lottery numbers
Lines for both Ithuba draws, Lotto six from 52 and PowerBall five from 50 plus a PowerBall from 20, weighted by the digit roots your chart favours.
Numbers built from your chart, not a shuffle
Any site can pick random numbers. Weighting the pool by your own Day Master, Life Path and Lo Shu grid needs your birth moment.
The formats, side by side
| Game | Numbers drawn | Second pool | Jackpot odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| South African Lotto | 6 of 1–52 | — | 1 in 20,358,520 |
| South African PowerBall | 5 of 1–50 | 1 of 1–20 (PowerBall) | 1 in 42,375,200 |
South African Lotto
Six from 52, drawn Wednesday and Saturday by Ithuba. A bonus ball is drawn after for the lower prize tiers rather than picked. There are 20,358,520 ways to choose 6 numbers from 52, and a line covers exactly one of them, which is the whole arithmetic behind the 1 in 20,358,520.
South African PowerBall
Five from 50 plus a PowerBall from 20, a different game from the American Powerball despite the name, and drawn from a much smaller pool. There are 2,118,760 ways to fill the 5 main numbers, and each must also land the right PowerBall, one of 20 possibilities, from a separate pool, which multiplies out to the 1 in 42,375,200.
South African Lotto: Every prize tier, computed
The same counting that gives the jackpot figure gives every tier below it: ways to match exactly that many numbers, divided into the total number of possible draws.
| Result | Odds of exactly this |
|---|---|
| Match 6 | 1 in 20,358,520 |
| Match 5 | 1 in 73,763 |
| Match 4 | 1 in 1,311 |
| Match 3 | 1 in 67.1 |
Each row is one line landing exactly there. Whether the operator pays that tier varies by market.
South African PowerBall: Every prize tier, computed
The same counting that gives the jackpot figure gives every tier below it: ways to match exactly that many numbers, divided into the total number of possible draws.
| Result | Odds of exactly this |
|---|---|
| Match 5 + PowerBall | 1 in 42,375,200 |
| Match 5 | 1 in 2,230,274 |
| Match 4 + PowerBall | 1 in 188,334 |
| Match 4 | 1 in 9,912 |
| Match 3 + PowerBall | 1 in 4,280 |
| Match 2 + PowerBall | 1 in 299 |
| Match 3 | 1 in 225 |
| Match 1 + PowerBall | 1 in 56.9 |
| Match 0 + PowerBall | 1 in 34.7 |
| Match 2 | 1 in 15.7 |
Each row is one line landing exactly there. Whether the operator pays that tier varies by market.
Play a different lottery?
Same birth data, a different pool to fit it to. There is also every lucky-number calculator.
The birthday problem
Read this as a note on other players, not on the draw. Your chance of matching is fixed by the format. Your chance of matching alone is not, and that is the difference between a whole prize and a quarter of one.
South African Lotto
Only 60 per cent of the South African Lotto pool falls inside calendar range: 31 numbers a date could give you, 21 it cannot. Hand-picked lines lean on that smaller half, because birthdays, anniversaries and house numbers all stop at 31. Lines built entirely from calendar numbers make up 3.6 per cent of the possible lines, and a far larger share of the tickets people fill in by hand. Nothing up there is more likely to be drawn. Rather less of the country is waiting on it.
South African PowerBall
Only 62 per cent of the South African PowerBall pool falls inside calendar range: 31 numbers a date could give you, 19 it cannot. Hand-picked lines lean on that smaller half, because birthdays, anniversaries and house numbers all stop at 31. Lines built entirely from calendar numbers make up 8.0 per cent of the possible lines, and a far larger share of the tickets people fill in by hand. Nothing up there is more likely to be drawn. Rather less of the country is waiting on it. The PowerBall pool stops at 20, so that one sits inside calendar range whatever you do with the main numbers.
Figures computed from each game's own format. The calculator above weights your pool by your chart rather than by this, and neither approach makes a draw more predictable than it is.
Two draws under one licence
Ithuba holds the national lottery licence and runs both games: Lotto at six from 52, and PowerBall at five from 50 with a PowerBall from 20. The two have quite different profiles, and the PowerBall second pool is the thing that pushes its top prize out of reach relative to the straight six-number game.
A share of revenue goes to the National Lotteries Commission and out to good causes, which has been the subject of considerable public scrutiny in South Africa. That is a reasonable thing to read about before deciding a ticket is a donation.
The two games sit a clean factor apart. Lotto asks for six numbers and nothing else; PowerBall asks for five and then a PowerBall from twenty. That second pool alone multiplies the difficulty of the top prize by twenty, and it is the whole reason the two jackpots behave so differently.