Vote Leave launches £50m Euro 2016 competition
A football guessing game with a £50m prize and free entry might sound like the sort of email that automatically lands in the spam folder.
Even if not, most discerning folk would raise at least one eyebrow of scepticism at the prospect of guessing correctly the result of every one of the Euro 2016 matches.
Whether you decided to play along or not, you certainly wouldn't expect the masterminds behind the operation to be Vote Leave – the official campaign group gunning to leave the European Union.
But that's exactly who has just launched 50Million.UK, the latest football prediction game, which is offering a guaranteed £50m to anybody who predicts the results of every single game in this summer's Euro 2016 championships.
But there's a few catches – and even if you decide to play, you're more likely to have walked on the moon than land the top prize.
What is it?
50Million.UK is just like every other guessing game of its kind – except its run not by a bookie or a tournament organiser, but a political campaign group.
Punters have to log in, guess the result (not the scores) of all the games in Euro 2016, including the knockout rounds. If anybody gets all 51 right, they claim the £50m prize.
However, there is a guaranteed £50,000 up for grabs to the person who gets the most right, even if they fall short of a perfect score.
Surely they can't do that?
Vote Leave said they received two specific donations to cover the cost of the competition, but would not reveal how much they were spending on the scheme.
Campaign finance rules limit spending to well below £50m, however, so Vote Leave has taken out an insurance policy with Lloyds of London to cover the potential costs, should somebody defy the astronomical odds (see below) and guess all 51 results correctly.
Why £50m?
The prize of £50m represents the amount Vote Leave claim the UK sends to Brussels every day. Although there has been more than a little controversy over this figure.
Today, the UK's top statistician attacked the group for sticking by the number, just one day after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) launched an online guide to understanding the UK's contribution to the EU budget.
Either way, you can be sure those entering the competition aren't complaining that they've chosen a higher figure.
Why are they doing it?
It's all about the data. With the referendum campaign now in its final four weeks, Vote Leave want your details, and your email address, so they can send you some more traditional campaign literature.
Will I actually win?
Almost certainly not. As anybody with an interest in statistics knows, once you start predicting multiple events to occur, the chances of them happening ramp up pretty quickly.
For instance, the chances of calling a coin-toss correctly 51 times in a row is one-in-2.5 quadrillion (15 zeroes). That's 2,500,000,000,000,000/1.
Even in a game like football, where two sides are rarely even matched, if you backed the favourites to win every game your odds would be better than 50m/1.
.@vote_leave We have crunched the numbers. The odds of winning this are at least a trillion to one, Best of luck!
— Ladbrokes Politics (@LadPolitics) May 27, 2016
To secure the same prize money back from a £1 wager with a bookmaker, according to City PM's maths, you'd only need the odds on each winner to be 2/5 – heavily odds-on and rare even for an international football tournament. Only three of the group games have favourites currently available at prices that short.
Alex Donohue of Ladbrokes said: "Trying to work out the odds of correctly predicting the outcome of every Euro 2016 game sent our system into meltdown. The final number is in the trillions, so anyone who thinks they have cracked it should probably just stick a quid on instead."