There Is No Lottery Strategy

People who play the lottery for fun usually don't worry about lottery winning secrets and strategies; they know it is purely a game of chance. But people with gambling addictions and those who take lottery play seriously are often convinced there is a system that will increase their chances of winning a prize. These players won't think twice about buying lottery strategy guides, after all, they may spends hundred per month on lotto and lottery tickets.

Unfortunately, lottery "secrets" often contain nothing more than dubious mathematical claims and lists of previous winning combinations, neither of which will give you an edge over other players.

The key to understanding why there is no winning strategy is to know that every number has an equal chance of being drawn, which means that every combination of numbers is just as (un)likely to be drawn as any other combination.

The odds of winning the jackpot depend on the set of numbers and how many are drawn. For example, in the US-based Mega Millions Lottery you have to choose 5 distinct numbers out of 56 and one mega ball from between 1 and 46. The total number of ways to get the correct combination is 1.

The total number of possible combinations is (56 C 5)*46 = 46*(56*55*54*53*52)/(5*4*3*2*1) = 175,711,536, thus your chances of winning are 1/175711536, or about 0.000000005691. The Powerball Lottery has similar odds. For Powerball you choose 5 out of 59 and 1 out of 35.

Some people who are not convinced that each combination is equally likely will cite examples of tickets with obvious number patters, for instance, tickets with 5 consecutive numbers. If must choose 5 out of 50 numbers, there are only 46 ways to pick a set of 5 consecutive numbers. This might lead you to believe that a ticket with "11, 12, 13, 14, 15" is less likely to win than a ticket with "3, 16, 28, 39, 47."

But lottery drawings aren't about matching patterns, they are about matching sets of numbers. You are just as unlikely to win the lottery if you play "11, 12, 13, 14, 15" as if you play "3, 16, 28, 39, 47." As sets of numbers, they have an equal likelihood of being drawn.

Each drawing is an independent event. It does not influence subsequent drawings nor is it influenced by previous drawings. If you play the same set of numbers week after week without winning, your chances of winning with that combination do not increase over time.

The same logic applies if you buy a ticket with combination of numbers that previously won. It is unlikely that the same set of numbers will be drawn twice, but it is no more unlikely than any other combination of numbers.

Some lottery players look at data tables from previous drawings to glean which numbers are more likely to be drawn. The problem with this strategy is that their sample size is way too small to give them a clear picture of the situation.

Imagine a lottery in which you pick 5 out of 50 and you look at the past 10 drawings. In this small set of past results, the probability of each number having been drawn exactly once is very low, thus you will likely see some numbers drawn more than once and others not at all. This could lead you to believe that some numbers really do have a higher chance of being selected.

But in order to get a true picture of the probabilities, you would need to look at thousands of previous lottery results. If you did this, you would see that the occurrence of each number begins to equalize the more results you examine.

The only true way to increase your chance of winning a prize is to buy more than one ticket per drawing. Of course, with this strategy, the expected amount of money you lose increases! If you ever wondered why groups frequently win the jackpot, it's because lottery clubs buy a lot of tickets. But for every lottery club that hits the jackpot, there are millions of groups who don't win and waste a ton of money on tickets.