4-Digits (Abbreviation: 4-D) is a lottery in Singapore and Malaysia. People play by choosing any number from 0000 to 9999. Then, 23 winning numbers are drawn each time. If one of the numbers match the one that the player has bought, a prize is won. The 4-D banker chooses the bets with the lowest bet frequencies for the prizes.

Singapore Pools is the sole provider of gambling games in Singapore. 4-D and lottery 6/45 are two of the most popular. A similar 4-D game with its prize structure fully revealed can be found in Taiwan. ^[1]

4-Digits is somewhat similar to "Pick 4" in the United States and Canada.

History

The 4-D game is believed to have originated in Kedah in 1951, based on evidence during a gambling trial in a Singapore court in 1956.

A schoolboy decided to raffle his bicycle for 100 $1 tickets, each bearing two digits. The winner would be the one whose ticket number matched the last two digits of the first prize ticket in a Malaysian Turf Club sweepstake. This led to the 2-D lottery, which in turn gave rise to 3-D and later, 4-D, betting games which were wildly popular in Singapore and Malaysia from the 1950s.

The Singapore Turf Club was the first to introduce the 4-D draw in Singapore in May 1966, offering a S$2,000 first prize for a $1 ticket. It stopped offering it in May 2004 when its sister company Singapore Pools took over all the draws.

Singapore Pools launched computerised betting for 4-D on 31 May 1986, and it got off to an auspicious start when the winning number for the firsat prize in the inaugural draw turned out to be 8838. The number "8" sounds like fa (Chinese: 发) or "prosper" in Mandarin and is traditionally a favourite among punters.

Methods of Play

Ordinary Entry

Ordinary entry refers to a specific number. Example: 1234

4-D Roll

4-D Roll refers to a bet which substitutes any one of the four digits with 'R'. (i.e. R123, 1R23, 12R3 and 123R) where 'R' denotes all digits from 0 to 9. Only one digit can be substituted with 'R'. For example, if you mark R234, you are actually buying 10 Ordinary Entries (i.e. 0234, 1234, 2234, 3234... 9234).

System Entry

System entry refers to a bet on all the possible permutations of a 4-D number, e.g. the number 1234 has 24 permutations (1234, 2341, 3412, 4123…).

iBet

iBet is a System Entry bet priced from $1, regardless of the number of permutations.

Quickpick

Quick pick refers to a bet on a random number selected by the computer.