Lodavo vs Daily Grand: A Free Draw, or $3 a Play for $1,000 a Day

Daily Grand is the national lottery whose top prize is an income. Match five numbers and the Grand Number and you get $1,000 a day for the rest of your life, or $7 million up front if you’d rather. A play costs $3, the draws are Monday and Thursday, and the chance of that top prize is 1 in 13,348,188. Lodavo vs Daily Grand compares that prize with a draw you don’t pay for at all. Lodavo is a free savings app that gives you tickets in a weekly cash draw, and the more you save, the more tickets you get.

What is the difference between Lodavo and Daily Grand?

Both give you a regular chance at a cash prize. The difference is what you give up to be in the draw. Every Daily Grand play costs $3, and the $3 is spent whether your numbers come up or not. Lodavo’s tickets cost nothing. They’re based on the balance in your savings or chequing account, and that balance is still yours after the draw.

The prizes aren’t on the same scale either. Daily Grand’s top prize could mean never working again, while Lodavo’s tops out at $10,000. So one is a paid chance at a life-changing prize, and the other is a free weekly draw that rewards you for saving.

How Daily Grand works

A Daily Grand play is five numbers from 1 to 49 plus one Grand Number from 1 to 7, and it costs $3. The Interprovincial Lottery Corporation draws the numbers every Monday and Thursday night, and the game is sold right across Canada. In Quebec it’s called Grande Vie. It has been running since October 2016.

Two prizes that pay for life

Match all five numbers and the Grand Number and the prize is $1,000 a day for life. Match the five without the Grand Number and it’s $25,000 a year for life. Both annuities run for at least 20 years, and the winner can take a lump sum instead: $7 million for the first, $500,000 for the second.

The choice isn’t always yours, though. Under the game conditions (opens in a new tab), if more than one ticket wins the same prize in the same draw, the winners split the lump sum. A ticket shared by a group, like an office pool, is also paid as a lump sum, and so is a prize won by someone under the age of majority.

$1,000 a day, or $7 million?

At $1,000 a day, the annuity pays $365,000 a year, so it passes the $7 million lump sum after a little over 19 years. The second prize is easier to weigh. $25,000 a year over the 20-year minimum adds up to exactly $500,000, the same as its lump sum, so anything past 20 years is extra.

Which is worth more depends mostly on your age and on what $7 million would earn if you invested it today. A dollar paid 20 years from now buys less than a dollar does now. We cover the rest of what happens after a big win in what to do if you win the lottery in Canada.

What a $3 play usually wins

Loto-Québec’s game page (opens in a new tab) puts the odds of winning any prize at 1 in 6.8 and the theoretical payoff rate at 49%. So across everyone who plays, $1.47 of each $3 comes back as prizes and $1.53 stays with the lottery.

Most of the wins are small. A free play is 55% of them and a $4 prize is another 35%, so about 9 wins in 10 are one or the other. A prize of $10 or more comes up about once every 67 plays. Play both draws every week and that’s roughly once every eight months.

Where your Lodavo tickets come from

Every Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, Lodavo checks the balance of the savings or chequing account you’ve connected. Each full $25 in it gets you a free ticket in that week’s draw, so a bigger balance means more tickets. There’s no fee and nothing to buy.

A new number every evening

A Lodavo ticket is seven numbers from 0 to 99, and you can pick them yourself. The week’s seven winning numbers are chosen before anyone picks theirs and locked in with a published code, so they can’t be changed afterwards. Then one is revealed each evening, Monday to Sunday, at 8 p.m. ET. At the end of the week, the ticket with the most matching numbers wins at least $100, and matching all seven wins $10,000. The provably fair page shows how to check the numbers against the code.

The $10,000 is hard to win. One ticket has about a 1 in 16 billion chance of matching all seven, far longer odds than Daily Grand’s top prize. The difference is that a Lodavo ticket is free, so a bad week costs you nothing. Winners answer a skill-testing question before they’re paid, and the contest rules also include a way to enter by mail.

Can you keep playing Daily Grand and use Lodavo too?

Yes. Lodavo doesn’t ask you to give anything up or switch banks. It connects to the account where your savings are, and what you do with the rest of your money, Monday’s ticket included, is up to you.

Checking your numbers is part of the fun, and paying for a ticket you enjoy is perfectly fine. Adding Lodavo means your savings get you into a draw as well.

When Daily Grand is the better choice

On the prize itself, Daily Grand wins by a long way. Its top prize is worth $7 million as a lump sum, 700 times Lodavo’s $10,000. And at 1 in 13,348,188 per play, winning it is about 1,200 times more likely than one Lodavo ticket matching all seven. That’s ticket for ticket, and a Daily Grand ticket costs $3 where a Lodavo ticket is free.

It’s also the better pick if:

• The dream is an income. Lodavo can’t pay $1,000 a day for life, and it has nothing like the $25,000-a-year second prize.
• You judge a lottery by its top-prize odds. Daily Grand’s are the best of Canada’s three national draws, ahead of Lotto 6/49’s classic jackpot at 1 in 13,983,816 and Lotto Max at 1 in 33,446,140.
• You like two draws a week. Monday and Thursday. Lodavo has one draw a week, revealed a number at a time.
• You’d rather not set anything up. A Daily Grand ticket takes $3 and a lottery counter or your province’s lottery app. Lodavo needs a connected account to give you savings tickets.
• You play with a group. A shared ticket can win Daily Grand, though the group gets the lump sum rather than the income. Lodavo tickets belong to one person and can’t be shared.

If you’d rather keep your $6 a week

One play in each draw comes to $6 a week, or $312 a year. At a 49% payout, about $153 of that comes back as prizes on average, and about $159 stays with the lottery. If what you enjoy is having a chance at cash every week, more than the size of the prize, Lodavo gives you that for free.

Put the same $6 a week into savings and you’d have $312 by the end of the year. That balance earns 12 free tickets in every weekly draw from then on, and you’d collect about 300 tickets on the way there as it grows. There’s a number to check every evening, and the money is yours the whole time.

A $10,000 prize won’t change your life the way $1,000 a day would. What it can do is make saving more exciting, and give you a reason to put a little more away each week. The idea has a name, prize-linked savings, and it’s much older than Lodavo.

Want a weekly draw that can’t cost you a dollar? Get Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab).

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.