Tele-Lotto: East Germany's Lottery Had 430-Times-Better Odds. What That Really Meant for Players

On Sunday 9 January 1972, at 7 p.m. on the first channel of East German television, "Tele-Lotto" went on air for the first time. Five numbers were drawn from 35, and each number stood for a kind of film. If 19 came up, viewers got a short crime film; 32 meant a cartoon, 34 folk music, 31 wildlife. Since nobody knew in advance which five clips would play, the show was a small lucky dip of television with a lottery ticket attached.

Until 1984 the draw used a light-blue plastic contraption remembered as the "Lotto-Schnecke", the lottery snail, built by Werner Dose from Berlin-Altglienicke. A ball ran round the outside and knocked over one of 35 numbered flaps at the bottom. If it hit a number already drawn, that was a "Durchläufer", a run-through, and the draw was repeated. In 1984 a machine with a winding glass tube took over. Hosts were well-known actors, entertainers and athletes, flanked by a draw supervisor from the lottery company and someone from the State Notary's Office.

Many East Germans still remember Tele-Lotto as a TV show. Behind the show stood a state enterprise with clear rules, which can still be read in the old law gazettes. And behind the rules is a sum that, at first glance, comes out very much in the East's favour. At second glance it gets more interesting.

East Germany's state number lottery starts with a decree of 4 March 1954. It introduces a numbers game with effect from 1 March, sets up the VEB Zahlenlotto in Leipzig to run it and puts it under the Ministry of Finance. Section 5 states that 60 per cent of the stakes paid in go out as prizes. Lottery tax is cut to 10 per cent, and the net proceeds go to the district councils for the National Reconstruction Programme. One line in section 1 shows when it was written: the game is open to "all citizens of Germany".

In 1968 the Leipzig lottery company and VEB Sport-Toto Berlin were merged. From 1 June the business was called VEB Vereinigte Wettspielbetriebe, based in Berlin and again under the Ministry of Finance. Its statute, printed in the law gazette of 3 May 1968, kept the rate: 60 per cent of Toto and Lotto stakes had to be set aside for prizes. Net proceeds went partly to physical culture and sport and partly to local state bodies "for measures in the interest of the population". The accounts were checked by the State Financial Audit, and staff were sworn to secrecy about all official matters, even after they left.

Tele-Lotto was only one game among several. The party paper Neues Deutschland of 7 February 1983 prints four sets of results for a single game week: Zahlenlotto 5 from 90, Lotto-Toto 5 from 45, Tele-Lotto 5 from 35, and the GDR's own 6 from 49 with more than one draw. The one with the TV show stayed the best known.

For comparison, LOTTO 6aus49 today pays 50 per cent of stakes to winners. For every Mark that went on an East German ticket, 60 pfennigs came back to the players as a group. In 6aus49 today it is 50 cents per euro. That difference is real, and it is the actual reason one can call the East German lottery the better deal for players.

A line cost one Mark. Prizes were pari-mutuel, so they depended on how many players shared a tier's pot. We found no official prize statistics, but press retrospectives give similar figures: around 15 to 25 Mark for three correct, 200 to 600 Mark for four and 10,000 to 20,000 Mark for five. The GDR's statistical yearbook gives average gross pay for full-time workers in state-owned enterprises of 1,280 Mark a month for 1988, and 818 Mark for 1972. So by the late 1980s, five correct was worth roughly 8 to 16 months' wages. A lot of money, but not a new life.

Those ranges let us check whether the memories hold up. Multiply each prize by its probability and, at the midpoints, a line won about 50 pfennigs on average. At the low end of every range it is 32 pfennigs, at the high end 67. The statutory 60 pfennigs sit inside that band, so the remembered amounts fit what the statute required.

The same sum shows where the money went. At the midpoints, about 54 per cent of the prize money went to three-number winners, and only about 9 per cent to five-number winners. Tele-Lotto spread its money wide: lots of small amounts, a few middling ones, hardly anything large. 6aus49 works the other way round, with a large share of the pot going to the top tiers that a single line almost never reaches. Our study of what a typical line actually gets back shows the consequences.

Unification in 1990 brought a new order to lotteries in the East, because gambling in Germany is a matter for the federal states. The new eastern states set up their own lottery companies - Lotto Brandenburg, for example, under articles of association dated 3 April 1991 - and from 1991 began offering the West German 6 aus 49. The finance ministers of the five new states decided to end the old GDR games as of 30 September 1992.

The show outlived its own game. Because it was popular, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk kept "Tele-Lotto" going, now showing the results of 6 aus 49, Spiel 77 and Super 6 that had already been drawn the day before. It was finally dropped in 1997. Anyone in eastern Germany who plays 6aus49 today plays a game whose top prize is about 430 times harder to win - a top prize many times larger, paid from a pot ten percentage points smaller.