Win the Lottery

This is a common trap. Obviously it lacks originality but more than that it reduces your chances of winning. Just think about it -- the days and months only go up to 31 and 12. Even if you do win using your birth digits, the chances are you'll have to split the winnings with more people. After all everyone's birthday begins with 19 (and anyone who doesn't should not be playing). The same applies to buying a ticket when there's a bigger jackpot -- more people play so the odds are more people win. Let's be honest you don't want to have to share with strangers anymore than you want to hear from your second cousin twice removed after a 20-year silence.

Camelot recently released a list of the top Lottery-winning professions. Builders and labourers have been the biggest winners, followed by administators and managers. The unluckiest in the Top 40? Poor funeral directors.

Billy Gibbons (no, not him from ZZ Top) found an unusual way of picking good numbers. Billy's chicken "Kiev" picked five winning Lotto numbers after trampling on his owner's calculator. "Kiev" is now called "Lucky" and helps Billy pick his Lotto numbers every Saturday morning.

Diagonal lines, straight lines, star shapes, boxes, zig-zags - doing this on your slip is silly. You might think you're being clever but again, you and thousands of other people will be thinking exactly the same thing.

They might tell us it's all totally random, but certain balls have a knack of being drawn more freqeuntly than others. Find out which ones are cropping up most often when making your choices. Number seven and multiples of it are popular choices. And rightly so, number seven appears in the list of top 10 winning numbers in both the South African and UK lotteries.

It's worked for some people. Housing officer Janette Wright was told by a tarot card reader that one day she would come into money. A few years later, she bought a Lucky Dip and promptly won a £1,633,505 Lotto jackpot.

You'd be suprised how many people don't check whether they've won. What's more, winning tickets have to be claimed within 180 days of the draw, otherwise the money goes off to the Lotto's Good Causes fund. A ticket worth £9,476,995 was once distributed in this way and it was the 24th prize in excess of a million pounds to be unclaimed.