Lodavo vs Lotto 6/49: The Odds, the Gold Ball and a Free Draw

A $3 Lotto 6/49 play gets you into two draws on the same night: the Classic, for a fixed $5 million, and the Gold Ball, for $1 million or a jackpot that can reach $68 million. The draws are every Wednesday and Saturday. Lodavo is a free savings app with a weekly cash draw of its own, and the more you save, the more tickets you get. So Lodavo vs Lotto 6/49 pits a paid chance at millions against a free weekly draw.

What is the difference between Lodavo and Lotto 6/49?

Both are draws with a cash prize that someone always wins: at least $1 million on every 6/49 Gold Ball draw, and at least $100 for a Lodavo user every week. What differs is the price of getting in. A 6/49 play costs $3, and you don’t get the $3 back after the draw. A Lodavo ticket is free. You get one for every $25 in your savings or chequing account, and that money is still yours after the draw.

The prizes are on different scales, too. A 6/49 ticket can win millions, and Lodavo’s top prize is $10,000.

How Lotto 6/49 works

Each $3 play gives you six numbers from 1 to 49 for the Classic draw, plus a 10-digit Gold Ball number chosen by computer. The Interprovincial Lottery Corporation runs the game, and the provincial and regional lottery corporations sell it across Canada. Loto-Québec puts the odds (opens in a new tab) of winning a prize at 1 in 6.6 per play. The game has been running since June 12, 1982.

The Classic draw pays a fixed $5 million

Match all six numbers and you win $5 million, split evenly if other tickets match too. The odds are 1 in 13,983,816 per play. The Classic jackpot stays at $5 million even when nobody wins it. The three prizes below it come out of a shared pool and move with sales, and the rest are fixed.

The pool prizes are averages from Loto-Québec’s prize structure (opens in a new tab). What a pool prize actually pays depends on that draw’s sales and on how many tickets share it.

The Gold Ball draw pays $1 million or the jackpot

Your Gold Ball number goes into a second draw, where one number is drawn from all the Gold Ball numbers issued across Canada for that night. Whoever holds it wins $1 million or the Gold Ball jackpot, and one ball from a drum decides which. The drum starts with 30 balls (opens in a new tab): 29 white ones worth $1 million each, and a gold one worth the jackpot. Every white ball drawn is taken out and adds $2 million to the jackpot, which starts at $10 million and reaches $68 million if the gold ball is the last one left. Once the gold ball comes out, the jackpot goes back to $10 million.

So someone wins at least $1 million every Wednesday and Saturday. Your chance of being that person is one in however many Gold Ball numbers were issued for the draw, so there’s no fixed number to quote. For a sense of scale, the Western Canada Lottery Corporation sold $250 million of Lotto 6/49 (opens in a new tab) in the year to March 2025. That’s roughly 800,000 plays a draw in the Prairies and the North alone, before Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Atlantic Canada add theirs.

What a $3 play is worth, on average

Loto-Québec lists the theoretical payoff rate for 6/49 at 48%. On a $3 play, that’s $1.44 back to players as prizes on average, and $1.56 kept by the lottery. The prize structure also shows where that $1.44 goes. About 89 cents goes into the fund for the big prizes: the $5 million, the $1 million Gold Ball prizes and the Gold Ball jackpot. The other 55 cents or so pays every smaller prize, free plays included.

That’s why most wins are small. A free play comes up once every 8.3 plays, against 1 in 6.6 for any prize, so about four wins in five are a free play. Play twice a week for a year, which is 104 plays and $312, and on average you’d collect about a dozen free plays and three cash prizes, nearly all of them $5 or $10.

How does Lodavo’s weekly draw work?

Lodavo is free, and it connects to the savings or chequing account you already use. Your balance at 8 p.m. ET each Sunday sets your tickets for the week, one for each full $25, so a bigger balance means more chances to win.

Seven numbers, one revealed each night

A Lodavo ticket is seven numbers from 0 to 99. You can pick them yourself or let the app fill them in. The week’s winning numbers are set before anyone picks, and we publish a code up front that lets anyone check afterwards that they weren’t changed. They’re then revealed one at a time, every evening at 8 p.m. ET from Monday to Sunday. The ticket with the most matches wins at least $100, and matching all seven wins $10,000, split if more than one person does. The provably fair page shows how the check works.

To collect a prize, a winner answers a skill-testing question. And if you’d rather not use the app, the contest rules include a way to enter by mail.

Where the prize money comes from

A lottery pays its prizes out of what players spend, which is where that 48% comes from. Lodavo’s prize money comes from companies instead. When you sign up for a financial product the app recommends, the company behind it pays us a referral fee, and that’s what funds the draw. You don’t pay anything extra, and skipping every offer doesn’t change your savings tickets. Our guide to how free money apps make money covers the model in more detail.

Can you play Lotto 6/49 and use Lodavo too?

Yes. Your Sunday-night balance still gets you Lodavo tickets, whether or not you bought a 6/49 ticket that week.

If a Saturday ticket is part of your week and you enjoy it, that’s perfectly fine. Lodavo just means the money you’re saving gets you into a draw as well.

When Lotto 6/49 is the better choice

If you’re playing for a fortune, Lotto 6/49 wins by a mile. The Classic jackpot alone is $5 million, 500 times Lodavo’s top prize, and the Gold Ball jackpot can reach $68 million. The odds favour 6/49 too. At 1 in 13,983,816, a play is about 1,100 times more likely to win the Classic jackpot than a Lodavo ticket is to match all seven numbers (roughly 1 in 16 billion). Keep in mind that’s a $3 ticket against a free one.

It’s also the better fit if:

• You don’t want to connect an account. A 6/49 ticket takes $3 and a lottery counter, website or app. Lodavo needs a connected account to give you tickets for your savings.
• You buy tickets with a group. OLG and Loto-Québec both offer group play. A Lodavo ticket is tied to one person’s account, and the rules don’t allow sharing or selling it.
• You like to win something often. About 1 play in 6.6 wins a prize, even if it’s usually a free play. Lodavo’s draw has one prize a week.

If you play for the fun of checking your numbers

Lodavo gives you that for free. A winning number comes out every evening, there’s a cash prize every week, and you never pay to enter. What you give up is the chance at millions.

What a month of 6/49 is worth as savings

Playing every Wednesday and Saturday costs $6 a week, or about $26 a month. Put one month of that into your savings account instead and it earns you a free ticket in every weekly Lodavo draw, for as long as you leave it there. Each month you do it adds another ticket to every draw after that.

Lodavo won’t make you rich. What it does is give you a weekly chance at cash for saving, which can make the habit easier to keep. The idea is called prize-linked savings, and the UK government has been running a version of it since 1956.

Want your savings to get you into a weekly cash draw? Lodavo is free to download from the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) and the 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.