WILD 5 Odds Explained: The Largest Pool on the Board
WILD 5 draws five numbers from 49, the biggest pool of any Emirates game. Here is the arithmetic, and what it costs compared to FAST 5's five from 42.
Published 11 November 2026 · the numbers in this guide are read live from our archive.
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The short answer. WILD 5 asks for
5 numbers from 49, which is
1 in 1,906,884 for one line. It is the largest
pool of any Emirates game, and that alone makes it roughly
2.2 times harder than FAST 5, which asks for
the same five matches out of only 42.
The calculation
Five numbers from 49, order ignored. Multiply the choices as the balls come out
— 49, then 48, down to 45 — and then divide by the 120 orders those same five numbers
could have arrived in, because WILD 5 does not care which came first. What is left is
1,906,884 distinct lines. Exactly one of them is
the winning line.
WILD 5 top-prize odds: there are 1,906,884 ways to choose 5 numbers from 1–49, so matching all of them with one line is 1 in 1,906,884. This is arithmetic on the game’s format, not a claim about any draw.
That division by the orderings is the step people skip, and skipping it is why the quoted figure
often looks smaller than someone expected after doing the multiplication in their head. The
multiplication counts sequences; the lottery sells sets.
What seven extra balls cost
This is the useful comparison on this page, because it isolates one variable. FAST 5 and WILD 5
both ask for five matches. The only difference between them is the size of the drum. So hold the
pick count at 5 and add one ball at a time.
Ways to choose 5 numbers from a growing pool, computed from the registry
Numbers in the pool
Possible lines
Added by that one ball
42 (FAST 5)
850,668
—
43
962,598
+111,930
44
1,086,008
+123,410
45
1,221,759
+135,751
46
1,370,754
+148,995
47
1,533,939
+163,185
48
1,712,304
+178,365
49 (WILD 5)
1,906,884
+194,580
Notice the right-hand column growing as it goes down. The first extra ball adds fewer lines than
the last one does, because each new ball can combine with everything already in the drum. The cost
of a wider pool is not flat; it accelerates. Across the seven balls between
42 and 49, the count goes from
850,668 to 1,906,884.
WILD 5 draws on Saturday nights. One draw a week, 52 a year.
Pool against pick, settled
Put this page next to the MEGA 7 one and the whole ranking falls out. MEGA 7 has the
smallest pool of the four games and the longest odds by a wide margin, because it asks for
seven matches. WILD 5 has the largest pool and still comes in well short of MEGA 7,
because it only asks for five. Pool matters; pick count matters more.
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.
MEGA 7 top-prize odds: there are 10,295,472 ways to choose 7 numbers from 1–37, so matching all of them with one line is 1 in 10,295,472. This is arithmetic on the game’s format, not a claim about any draw.
Read down the table in that order and the two levers are plain. Among the games that ask for five
matches, the pool decides. Between five matches and seven, the pool barely gets a say.
What 1 in 1,906,884 looks like
A single line played every Saturday is one of 1,906,884 possibilities each week. Over a full year of Saturdays that is 52 lines against the same field, and
the field does not shrink as you go — it refills every week. There is no accumulation,
because a line that lost last Saturday is eligible again this Saturday and counts as freshly one
in 1,906,884.
That last point is where intuition tends to mislead people most. Weeks of play feel like progress
through a list. They are not: each draw is its own list, complete, and the one before it has been
thrown away.
Most recent WILD 5 draw on record: 7 Nov 2026 — 1, 21, 9, 49, 6.
How often each WILD 5 number has appeared across the archive, with the even-chance line marked.
What the frequency chart is not
Above is every one of the 49 WILD 5 numbers with its count from the archive, and
the dashed line is what perfectly even chance would have produced over
20 draws. Numbers sit on both sides of it. That spread is what a
fair draw looks like — a chart where every bar met the line exactly would be the surprising
one.
Odds describe the format, not the next draw. No pattern in the archive shortens 1 in
1,906,884. Our own number scoring lives on
the lucky numbers page, published together with how it performed when
we tested it, which was the same as picking at random.
Where the published figure comes from
One question we get often enough to answer in writing: why does our odds figure sometimes differ
by a hair from one printed elsewhere? Two reasons, and neither is a disagreement about the maths.
The first is rounding. A site that writes "1 in 1.9 million" has not made an error, it has made a
choice about how much precision a reader needs. We print the exact integer because the exact
integer is what the combination formula returns, and because a rounded figure cannot be checked
against anything. The second is what gets counted as a jackpot requirement. Some games add a
separate bonus ball or a multiplier drawn from its own small pool, and whether that extra ball is
folded into the top-prize calculation changes the answer by a large multiple. WILD 5 has no such
extra draw, so the question does not arise here, but it is the usual source of two honest sites
publishing different numbers for the same game.
Everything on this page is computed at page load from the same registry that drives the results
tables, which means the figures in the prose and the figures in the table cannot drift apart. If
the pool or the pick count were ever corrected, both would move together.
For anyone who wants to verify the figure independently rather than take ours: the combination
formula is the number of ways to pick the required balls from the pool without regard to order, and
any scientific calculator with an nCr key will return it from two inputs. Enter the pool size, the
pick count, and compare. We would rather a reader checked the arithmetic than trusted a page,
including this one, and a figure that can be reproduced in ten seconds on a calculator is the kind
worth publishing in full.
The WILD 5 result card, redrawn whenever a new Saturday draw is stored.
Matching all 5 numbers from 1 to 49 with a single line is 1 in 1,906,884. That is the top prize; the lower tiers ask for fewer matches and are shorter.
No. Both ask for five matches, but WILD 5 draws from 49 numbers against FAST 5's 42, so WILD 5 is about 2.2 times harder: 1 in 1,906,884 against 1 in 850,668.
Every Saturday at 9 PM Gulf Standard Time. That is 52 draws a year, one night a week, and the result appears on our WILD 5 page once the official numbers are published.
Only because of the pool. With the number of matches held at five, every extra ball added to the drum widens the field of possible lines, and seven extra balls between 42 and 49 is enough to more than double the count.
No. Each Saturday draw starts from the full pool of 49 again, so nothing from last week carries forward. We publish frequency counts because readers ask for them, with the even-chance line marked so they are read honestly.
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