Right you f**kers, I have employed my Holmesean powers of deduction and reasoning and my f

earsome intellect and figured it out.

Two options.

ONE: that the BBC show is a pre-record, and the whole trick was actually pretty cheap and disappointing.

OR

TWO: That at some point between the numbers being shown on Derren's TV and Derren writing them down, the Channel 4 show seamlessly switched between a live broadcast and one of fifty five thousand odd pre-recorded snippets of TV he has spent the last year painstakingly and exhaustingly putting together. You know the bit where he was stood stock still for ages - could have used that bit for the switch.

"Ah, but, AB, you fool, there's something like 14 million combinations of lottery results, it can't be that."

True enough, but DB only said he was going to predict 5 of the numbers, ignoring the bonus ball, so if we presume that he has picked one of his numbers, say the 2, and then done snippets of tv for the others, he would "only" have to do 55,491[*] pre-records, and then have a 1/49 chance on the night of his guess for the sixth number being correct.

If the required length of each pre-record is a minute, that's nine-hundred-odd hours worth of pre-recording he's have to do, or almost forty days. That's a lot.

Still, I've read his books and seen his live shows, and he does always say, never underestimate the lengths an illusionist will go to to con you.

So, that's that, then, AB has worked it out.

No, of course not - it isn't that ^^^, certainly, I haven't a f**king clue. Nice to see on Friday if he does tell us how he actually did it though.

-------
[*]: The workings out for those numbers, stats fans, taken from User Posted Link

"# The Jackpot - 6 Numbers (Typical prize: ?2 million)
6 numbers are drawn at random from the set of integers between 1 and 49, which means there are 49!/(6!*(49-6)!) combinations of numbers - this means that the jackpot chance is 1 in 13,983,816 or approximately 1 in 14 million.

# 5 Numbers + Bonus Number (Typical prize: ?100,000)
You are still matching 6 numbers from the 1 to 49 set as above, but you can now do it in 6 different ways (by dropping each of the main numbers in turn), therefore the chance is 1 in 13,983,816/6, which works out as 1 in 2,330,636.

# 5 Numbers (Typical prize: ?1,500)
This is 42 times more likely than getting 5 numbers + the bonus number - the chance is 1 in 2,330,636/42, which evaluates to 1 in 55,491.33333. "

Posted By: Arizona Bay on September 10th 2009 at 07:01:33

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