What Are The Odds Of Winning The Masters Lottery?

The hottest ticket in golf

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published 2 June 2023

On June 1 the Masters ballot opened for business with a load of us all clicking hungrily away in the vain hope of landing one of the hottest tickets in sport.

Ask any golf fan for their bucket-list wish and a trip to Augusta National would likely appear right at the very top of most lists. But what are the chances of any of us actually striking gold and landing a ticket to The Masters?

Bookies.com have put in some research and their findings are as interesting as they are depressing.

For info any of us are able to apply for tickets up until June 20. We can apply for tickets for Monday to Sunday and up to two tickets per household.

Bookies.com believe that the daily attendance at Augusta is around 40,000 patrons. This is based on previous estimates and what happens at the other Majors. It's likely that there might be up to 50,000 on the property for the practice rounds but, again, these are estimates as Augusta don't release any info on this.

For the purposes of this research we're only interested in the possibility of getting Thursday to Sunday tickets so the number is 40,000.

Then they looked at the number of weekly badges that are already taken up. After some detective work and some loose maths they figure that they arrived at is between 15 and 20,000 so they have settled on 18,000.

Hence 40,000 - 18,000 = 22,000 tickets.

There's more waving of fingers in the air to try and estimate the number of people who are applying for these tickets. Given how relatively cheap they are – $140 per tournament day – they have gone on TV ratings.

Sunday’s final round of the 2021 Masters drew a reported 6.7 million households. They have guessed that 25% of those applied for the lottery so they have plumped for 2 millions applications.

Given everyone will likely be choosing the two-ticket option the actual chances of an applicant winning are split in half which leaves 11,000 winners.

So it's 11,000/2,000,000 = 0.0055.

So the odds of winning the Masters lottery for a single day is thought to be 0.55% or a little better than 1/200.

Good luck.

Mark has worked in golf for over 20 years having started off his journalistic life at the Press Association and BBC Sport before moving to Sky Sports where he became their golf editor on skysports.com. He then worked at National Club Golfer and Lady Golfer where he was the deputy editor and he has interviewed many of the leading names in the game, both male and female, ghosted columns for the likes of Robert Rock, Charley Hull and Dame Laura Davies, as well as playing the vast majority of our Top 100 GB&I courses. He loves links golf with a particular love of Royal Dornoch and Kingsbarns. He is now a freelance, also working for the PGA and Robert Rock. Loves tour golf, both men and women and he remains the long-standing owner of an horrific short game. He plays at Moortown with a handicap of 6.

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