To win the big games, a player must correctly choose five numbers from a field of between 30 and 75 numbers, and then pick the right number, in addition, from a separate field of between six and 35 numbers. Player calls Powerball, and its high-caliber cousins, Mega Millions and pick-5 hybrid games, “the crown jewels of the lottery game kingdom” that should only be pursued by serious players “who have amassed considerable wagering budgets from other games that they have learned to win consistently.” You do that by picking unpopular numbers-typically those more than 31 since they are no one's birthday,” he says. If the feeling that you hypothetically could win is worth $2 to you, then buy a ticket, but just know that that feeling is almost certainly the only thing you'll get for your money.”Īlexander points out that each possible Powerball entry has odds of 1 in 292 million, in every drawing. “The only thing you can change is reducing your chances of having to share the jackpot, if you hypothetically do win. People who play it should look at it as entertainment, coming out of the part of their budget that covers movies and ice cream cones. If there were financially sound ways to beat the lottery, hedge funds and the rest of Wall Street would have been all over it long ago. “The people making money off the lottery are mostly those who want to sell you useless schemes to try to win. The vast majority of lottery players lose money,” says University of Southern California mathematics professor Kenneth Alexander, who specializes in probability and something called “subadditive Euclidean functionals.” He dismisses anyone who makes money selling winning advice or number-selection tricks as a charlatan. “Financially, it most definitely does not make sense to play the lottery. They scoff at any kind of scheme that promises better odds of winning a fair game with a random drawing, as each number has its own equal chance of being drawn each time. Most probability professionals will agree that you can’t game a fair system.

Playing scratch off odds