Lotto fever is running high with nearly $1 billion up for grabs between the Mega Millions and Powerball drawings this week. No one can tell you how to beat the odds, but previous owners have shared how they played.
Lotto fever is running high across the country this week with nearly $1 billion up for grabs between the Mega Millions and Powerball drawings this week.
No one can tell you how to win these games of chance, and you already know astronomical the odds of winning are slim.
“For the $654 million Mega Million jackpot — which marks the game’s second-largest top prize ever — your chance of winning is 1 in 302.6 million,” says CNBC. “For Powerball’s $345 million top prize, it’s 1 in 292 million.”
“The chance of winning both is at least 1 in 88 quadrillion. That’s 88 followed by 15 zeros.”
You’ve got better odds of getting struck by lightning – 1 in 700,000 – this year in the United States, according to National Geographic.
But that hasn’t stopped the daydreaming.
Big-time lottery winners are often circumspect about the numbers they played, or how they chose them. But there are a few tips – some debatable – to be gleaned online from previous winners and math minds.
(Searching “how to win the lottery” on YouTube is like plunging head-first down a hole full of questionable “strategies” and “tricks.”)
The Mega Millions drawing is at 11 p.m. ET Tuesday, the Powerball drawing at 10:59 p.m. ET Wednesday night.
1. The numbers 16 and 32 have proven to be “lucky.” Last year, Jackpot.com, an online lottery site, studied the winning numbers from 1,500 separate draws in 15 international lotteries and found that No. 16 showed up most often, The New York Post reported.
“They discovered that the number 16 has been drawn 191 times, with 22 in second place with 179 draws,” the Post wrote. “Joint third was 28 and 37, both with 167 draws, 6 in fifth place with 166 draws, and 3 with 164.”
The lotteries that were studied included Mega Millions, the U. S. Powerball, German Lotto, UK Lotto and Irish Lotto, the Post reported.
Last year, by examining winning Powerball numbers only, MarketWatch found that some numbers had come up more often than others since the game “took its current format.”
“For the white balls, which number from 1 to 69, these 12 numbers have beaten the average by more than one standard deviation: 32,64,16,23,28,40,52,62,33,61,63 and 69,” MarketWatch wrote.
“And among the (red) Powerball numbers, which range from 1 to 26, the numbers that have come up most often are 9,10 and 21.”
2. Play numbers over 31. Studies have shown that most people pick numbers based on “special days of the month, such as birthdays and anniversaries,” according to MSN’s news site. “Therefore, by picking numbers over 31 or using random Quick Picks, you’ll decrease your chances of splitting a big prize.”
One exception to that rule: Mavis Wanczyk of Chicopee, Massachusetts, who won a mammoth $758.7 million Powerball jackpot last year. According to Inside Edition, she “bought five tickets but the one that used family birthdays paid off.”
3. Should you pick your own numbers? That’s highly debatable. Richard Lustig literally wrote the book on playing the lottery. “Learn How to Increase Your Chances of Winning The Lottery” is based on his more than two decades of lottery playing experience and as a seven-time grand prize lottery winner, according to CBS News.
“It doesn’t matter how you pick your numbers, once you pick your set of numbers, research them to know if it’s a good set of numbers and stick with them,” he told CBS. “There’s no magic method to picking your numbers, I get emails every day asking. One number doesn’t win the jackpot, a set of numbers does.
“The lazy way out is to buy quick picks. The computer picks out the numbers. Don’t play quick picks. Quick picks are the worst thing you can do, you are playing with the worst odds.”
Forbes, however, disagrees with Lustig’s advice about increasing your odds by avoiding quick picks. “This tip is mathematically incorrect,” Forbes wrote earlier this year.
“ Powerball and Mega Millions are based on random drawings. This means that every number has an equal chance no matter how it is picked. So, save the energy wasted on searching for birthdays or other lucky numbers.”
4. Don’t buy all your tickets from the same place. This seemed to work for Angelo Scanzello of Conshohocken, Penn., who last year ranked as the state’s ninth most-frequent lottery winner, scooping up $1.75 million in overall winnings, according to the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Penn.
“I just went to all different places, ” he told the newspaper. “I didn’t go to one place, that was one thing. I’d travel all around different areas.”
5. Play with co-workers or friends. Think “lottery syndicate.” If everyone contributes just a little each week, “you can multiply your chances of grabbing a jackpot,” and perhaps get closer to your friends while you do it, writes MSN.
“It should come as no surprise that most of the largest lottery jackpots of all time have been won by syndicates buying group tickets in bulk, in fact it is estimated that at least 1 out of every 7 (million-dollar) lotto prizes have been won by a syndicate.”
If you do that, Lustig advises, “everyone has a copy of all the numbers and a list of everyone in on the pool,” he told Inside Edition.
The idea of joining a lottery pool – “provided they are willing to share the jackpot with the other members of the pool” – gets a thumbs-up from Forbes, too.
6. Don’t ignore the second-chance drawings. “ People either don’t know about the drawings or don’t take time to enter, so your odds of winning are always better,” according to Reader’s Digest, which gathered tips from lottery winners.
“Some games require you to mail in your losing ticket. Others tell you to go online and register the ticket’s serial number.”
7. Envision yourself winning. Cynthia Stafford says it worked for her. In 2007 she was raising her deceased brother’s children when she won $112 million in the California Lottery.
She told ABC News that “believing and visualizing” herself winning was the key, “part of the ask-the-universe philosophy popularized by ‘The Secret’ and similar books a few years back,” ABC reported.
“I’m an avid reader,” Stafford said. “Read a book called ‘The Power of Your Subconscious Mind,’” she said.
