On Sept. 3, someone might win the $1.43 billion Powerball jackpot. It might even be you!
But it almost certainly won’t be.
The odds against winning the top prize on these lotteries are, as you’ve been told again and again and again, astronomical. Experts say, often, that you’re more likely to be bitten by a shark or struck by lightning than win the lottery.
However, since Florida is the shark bite capital of the world and the lightning capital of the U.S., we like those odds.
And since many people have difficulty really understanding big numbers, many of us default to thinking of lottery odds as 50/50: we won or we didn’t. And after all, someone has to win sometime. It might be you after all!
So how can you improve those ridiculous odds so you can afford your private island? What are the magic tricks and secret strategies to score life-changing amounts of cash? Here you go, and don’t tell anyone else.
That’s it, really.
Sort of? But not really.
“The only way to really increase the odds of winning any lottery is to buy more tickets. The more tickets you buy, the more chances you have to win,” said Nicholas Kapoor, Professor of Mathematics at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Technically, buying more tickets does increase your odds. But the odds are so incredibly against you that picking up 10 tickets instead of five on a Wednesday night makes very little difference.
To put that in the proper perspective — since shark bites and lightning are too commonplace in these parts — there were about 290.8 million vehicles registered to drivers in the United States as of September 2022, according to job site Zippia.
Playing the lottery is like trying to guess which one specific car, truck, SUV, or van, whether driving or parked or abandoned somewhere across all 50 states (including Alaska and Hawaii), has a sack of money hidden in the glove compartment.
With numbers like that, guessing 10, 100, or even 100,000 individual vehicles to try to find the right one doesn’t make getting the cash much more likely.
That’s about the same odds as winning the Mega Millions jackpot. The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are slightly worse than that.
There are plenty of tips to increase your chances, but they don’t help.
“I’ve seen it all and those tips are usually technically true but useless, or are just not true,” said Larry Lesser, a math professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who maintains a website on lottery literacy and has even written a parody version of Kenny Rogers hit song “The Gambler” to illustrate his point. “Contrary to scams’ claims, there are NO strategies to increase a ticket’s chance of winning a share of the jackpot,” he said.
What you can do, however, is increase the odds that if you do win, you get to keep more of the money.
Here, you can make a difference.
If you win the Powerball, Mega Millions or Florida Lotto, you have to split your new wealth with anyone else who picked the same numbers. So, pick numbers other people aren’t as likely to choose to increase the chances that if you do win, you’ll be the only one showing up for the big check.
Nope. While it can sometimes seem that certain places such as Publix and 7-Eleven seem to pay off more than others, it’s because they sell more tickets, according to Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman.
“There is no pattern,” Glickman said. “It’s entirely random.”
You can find patterns in winning numbers, of course, since humans can find patterns in anything, but they won’t help you predict future winning numbers in the slightest.
Sure. Just go in with your eyes open, don’t spend more than you can easily afford to lose, and don’t make financial or retirement plans based on your surefire numbers. The fun of playing and speculating what you’d do with your newfound wealth is worth a few or 20 bucks to a lot of people, so why not?
It’s cheap to buy a dream. Even a temporary one.
Contributing: Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY
(This story was updated to add new information.)