How the FAST 5 odds are built from five numbers in 42, what playing extra lines really changes, and why a run of Thursdays means nothing.
Published 9 November 2026 · the numbers in this guide are read live from our archive.
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The short answer. Matching all five FAST 5 numbers with one line is
1 in 850,668, and matching at least one of them is about
49 per cent. Both figures come from counting
the lines that can be made from 1 to 42, not from any claim about a draw, and
neither changes from one Thursday to the next.
Five balls come out of a drum holding 42. If the order they arrived in mattered, there
would be 42 possibilities for the first, 41 for the second and so
on, which multiplies out to 102,080,160 sequences. That is
the number a game would be judged on if tickets had to predict the running order.
FAST 5 does not care about the running order, and that single rule is worth more than any selection
method ever invented. A set of five numbers can be written down in
120 different orders, so each distinct line is being
counted 120 times over in the figure above. Divide it out and
850,668 distinct lines remain, one of which is drawn.
FAST 5 top-prize odds: there are 850,668 ways to choose 5 numbers from 1–42, so matching all of them with one line is 1 in 850,668. This is arithmetic on the game’s format, not a claim about any draw.
The FAST 5 result card: the one line out of all of them that came out last Thursday.
What are the chances of matching nothing at all?
This is the more useful question for most readers, and it is answered with the same counting. For a line
to match nothing, all five of your numbers have to come from the
37 numbers that were not drawn. Count the lines that can be built that way,
divide by the 850,668 lines in total, and you get the chance of a complete
miss.
One FAST 5 line, counted two ways
Outcome
Chance for one line
None of your five numbers drawn
about 51 per cent
At least one of them drawn
about 49 per cent
All five drawn
1 in 850,668
So a FAST 5 line is roughly a coin flip to touch the drawn set somewhere, and astronomically unlikely to
cover it. That gap between the two is the whole emotional shape of a lottery: near misses are common
enough to feel like progress, and they are not progress. Whether one match or two is worth anything is a
separate question entirely, set and published by the operator rather than by us; our
prize tiers page describes the structure without quoting amounts.
What does playing more lines actually change?
Multiple lines are the one intervention that genuinely moves the number, so it is worth being precise
about how much. Each additional different line is one more of the
850,668, which means the chance adds up rather than compounding.
Different lines in one draw, against the full count
Lines played
Top-prize chance
Share of all lines
1
1 in 850,668
0.000 per cent
10
1 in 85,067
0.001 per cent
100
1 in 8,507
0.012 per cent
1,000
1 in 851
0.118 per cent
A thousand distinct lines, which nobody sensible is playing weekly, still leaves the share in the third
column under a rounding error. That is the honest answer to every system that promises an edge through
volume: volume is linear, the pool is not, and the arithmetic was never in dispute. The one thing worth
taking from the table is the reverse reading. If a method claims to have improved your position, ask
which column it changed, because there are only two and neither responds to number selection.
Does a run of Thursdays tell you anything?
Times each FAST 5 number has been drawn, with the even-chance level marked across the chart.
No, and this chart is where the question usually comes from. The dashed line is the even-chance level:
with 5 balls drawn from 42, each number averages
5 appearances in every 42 draw-slots, and the line marks where
every bar would sit if history had come out perfectly level. It has not, and it never will, because
scatter around that line is what counting random events produces.
One FAST 5 draw a week, which is how slowly the counts behind that chart can accumulate.
The chart also fills far more slowly than it looks as though it should. FAST 5 draws once a week, so a
year of patient watching adds 260 ball appearances spread over
42 numbers. That is nowhere near enough to level a count, which is why every bar on
that chart will still be visibly above or below the line years from now. An uneven picture is not
evidence of an uneven draw, and a level picture would not be evidence of a fair one either; fairness is
a property of the mechanism, not of a tally.
The drum is refilled every week
All 42 numbers are available for every draw, with no weighting carried over from
the Thursday before. That is the whole reason the odds can be stated from the format at all: if
history changed them, no fixed figure would exist.
A leader in the count is not a favourite
The number at the top of the frequency table changes as the archive grows, and each change is noise
rather than news. Reading the leader as a tip is the most common mistake made with this data, which
is why the chart is captioned as a count and not as a ranking.
Short odds still are not short
FAST 5 has the shortest top-prize odds of the four Emirates games, and 1 in
850,668 is a long way from likely. Shortest of four is a comparison, not
a recommendation.
How FAST 5 compares, and what the archive adds
Winning entries per draw across the recent FAST 5 draws that carry a published count.
Against the other five-number Emirates game the comparison is clean, because only the pool differs:
FAST 5 asks for five numbers out of 42 where WILD 5 asks for five out of a larger set,
and the odds move from 1 in 850,668 to 1 in
1,906,884 as a result.
FAST 5 against WILD 5 works that pair through in detail, and
EASY 6 against MEGA 7 does the same where the pick changes instead
of the pool.
The archive on this site cannot shorten any of those figures, and it is still the part worth reading.
The FAST 5 winners page records how many entries won something in each
draw, which is the useful counterweight to odds this long, and
our explainer on winner counts sets out what that
figure covers. The FAST 5 number frequency page holds the counts
behind the chart above. We also tested the predictive claim rather than just denying it: the
lucky numbers page publishes how our own scoring performed against
hundreds of real draws, which was the same as random, and the
page on draw mechanics explains why. To check a line rather than to
understand the maths behind it, go to the FAST 5 results page or
our checking routine; the
FAST 5 guide covers the format itself.
Arithmetic, not advice. Every figure on this page is computed from the published format and
describes one line in one draw. We are not Emirates Draw, we sell no entries, and we cannot confirm or
pay a prize. Nothing here makes a lottery a sensible way to make money; play only with money you can
afford to lose.
Live results for the games in this guide
Every draw below is recorded here after it is published, with a dated archive behind it.
One line matching all five is 1 in 850,668. That is the number of different five-number lines that can be made from 1 to 42, and each of them is equally likely in each Thursday draw.
Five balls from 42 give 102,080,160 results if order counted. Order does not count, and any set of five can be arranged 120 ways, so the division leaves 850,668 distinct lines.
About 49 per cent, which is close to a coin flip. Five numbers are drawn from a pool of 42, so most lines catch one or two of them. Whether one match is worth anything is for the operator to set and publish.
Yes, and by a wide margin for the same effort. FAST 5 is 1 in 850,668 against 1 in 1,906,884 for WILD 5, because both ask for five numbers but WILD 5 draws from a larger pool.
It makes the chance ten times larger, which is not the same as better. Ten lines out of 850,668 is still a very small share of the possible lines, and the odds on each individual line do not move at all.
No. The pool is complete again for every draw, so the odds are set by the format rather than by history. A number drawn three weeks running and a number missing for months carry the same chance on the next Thursday.
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Every draw we publish
Results for 36 games, updated after every draw
Emirates Draw, the two US multi-state jackpots, and every New York and Florida game —
each with its own dated archive.
