The lottery is obviously pretty hard to win, but of course, we had to test it ourselves. So, we got a few wired colleagues to play a scratcher game. I didn’t win anything. I got nothing. I lost, but I didn’t win nothing. We won five dollars, so I’m up by two dollars. Scratchers are just one of the many lottery games out there. Beyond that, you have draw games at both the state and national levels, particularly the Powerball, which keeps making the news because the jackpots are so big. There are definitely lotteries that are easier to win than others. When you gamble, a bigger chance of winning usually means a lower payout.
For example, this is familiar from roulette, where if you bet on red or black, you get less money in return than if you bet on a single number, where you get a lot more because your odds of winning with a red or black bet are much higher. Similarly, your odds of winning on a Powerball or Mega Millions ticket are very low, about one in 300 million. Let’s look at that one more time: your chances of winning the Powerball jackpot are about 1 in 300 million. There are all kinds of lottery prizes out there, and some of them are still pretty big, but they’re not a billion dollars.
Next, playing certain numbers isn’t going to increase your chances of winning by some strategy about how you pick the exact numbers. However, for games like Powerball and Mega Millions, what you’d like to do if you win the jackpot is to be the only one who wins the jackpot so you don’t have to split it. With that perspective in mind, you’d like to pick unpopular numbers. Don’t pick dates, for example, because a lot of people gamble based on dates. Other advice might be to look at the ticket where you pick your numbers; don’t just pick a column of numbers on that ticket because some people will do that. Repeat winners like Richard Lustig, who won over one million dollars, advocated for playing sequential numbers.
Now, this won’t increase your odds of winning. That kind of thing is going to give you the same chance of winning the jackpot as any other method of choosing. However, if you look at a ticket like that, it looks weird, so many sequential numbers help you not share the jackpot, which is good. I don’t know, but that’s how it strikes me as a mathematician.
So, what are some ways that people attempt to increase their odds of winning the lottery? First, playing every single number combination in the drawing. For Mega Millions and Powerball, that’s not really a feasible choice because there are 300 million tickets. It’s super hard to go to the store and buy that many tickets; you need a whole army of helpers. It’s a complicated endeavor, but for smaller state-level lotteries, which have fewer tickets that you have to buy and also a smaller jackpot, people have done that. In particular, in New South Wales in 1986, a syndicate did that, and in Virginia in 1992, and then the Irish National Lottery.
In these cases, they didn’t actually succeed in getting 100% of the tickets, but they got enough that they got lucky and did win the jackpot. Now, if you do actually decide to do this, there are a bit of logistics involved. You’re actually going to have to go to the stores and buy those tickets. You can’t just pay the clerk in a lottery store to buy those tickets because they’re not allowed to do that by most lottery regulations. There’s another obvious gotcha: it could happen that someone else also wins the jackpot, and you have to split it with them. So, as someone trying to pursue this strategy, you absolutely want to keep your eyes open to that possibility.
Finally, some states have a higher chance of winning than others. Statisticians and economists have mapped out states that have a high rate of return. A good recipe to look for is a lottery where maybe not a lot of people are buying tickets, and yet the jackpot is pretty big. There’s a classic example of Oregon in 1999. They had an 18 million dollar jackpot, and yet they didn’t sell that many tickets. What that means is when you buy a ticket in such a drawing, you’re unlikely to share the jackpot. Similarly, in the mid-2000s in Texas, Llano, Texas had drawings like that as well. Looking around for those kinds of drawings is one way to increase your expected return on buying a lottery ticket.
Scratchers can have a high rate of return. Lotteries have printed them out and picked the prizes in such a way that the total value of the prizes is less than the amount people are going to spend on tickets, so they’re going to make money on average. You buy scratcher tickets, and you’re going to lose money just like any other gambling. That said, sometimes it happens that the big prizes in the scratcher game don’t get bought at the beginning of the game, and so effectively all the people buying up those tickets at the beginning got unlucky and didn’t get the big prizes. Then the remaining lottery tickets, the remaining scratchers that wait to be bought, have too many prizes. Many states show you how many of the prizes have been claimed, and that information gets aggregated into other websites like scratchoffods.com and similar sites, where you can go to that site, and they’ll tell you which lottery scratcher ticket games have better payouts right now.
Okay, even if you’ve watched this video, you might think you need to win a lottery. Is there a way you can actually guarantee a lottery win? You find a game where you have to guess a four-digit number, and you bet the six-way box. That means you’re going to bet on a four-digit number with repeated digits like 1122 or 1212. If you bet a six-way box, that’s all the possible six ways of writing a number with two ones in it and two twos in it. If you do that, your odds of winning are one in 1,667. In most states, if you hit that, if you win that bet, you will get $800, which means you have to go to a lottery office. You probably owe money just so you know it is not a recipe for making money, but it is a recipe for getting to that lottery office with the least amount of effort.
There even used to be a game where you were almost guaranteed to win. Marge and Jerry Selby ended up winning almost 8 million dollars playing the Massachusetts Cash WinFall. They even made a movie about it. They were betting forty thousand dollars. “You guys drug dealers?” “No, we’re professional lottery players.” In Cash WinFall, the way it worked was when the jackpot got pretty big, they would take some of that money and increase the value of the smaller prizes. To win the jackpot, you have to pick the right number. It’s about a one in nine million chance, but the smaller prizes are much more likely to win. So, if you could buy some, but not all of the tickets in that situation, like say you could buy a million tickets, your odds of winning the jackpot are not so big, one in nine, but you’re going to win a bunch of the lower-tier prizes, which are now bigger. If they’re big enough, you’re going to make money out of your total investment.
It’s really hard and unusual to be in a situation where you can reasonably expect to make money on the lottery. It’s gambling; you might get lucky, but it’s really about getting lucky. But I’m not telling you not to buy lottery tickets. I personally buy lottery tickets. I buy them for the fantasy, to think for a few days about what happens if I win this big jackpot, and that’s really worth something.
