They play their age, their children's birthdays, even the numbers they find in a fortune cookie. There are distinct patterns in the choices they make. We used a similar methodology as described here.Īs you'd expect, the distribution of numbers drawn on days when the jackpot was not won is pretty even (with the caveat that Powerball has changed the number of balls in the hopper over the years, so the higher end is naturally lighter). By combining these two, we can subset the number combinations that won a jackpot compared to those that didn't. Powerball does of course publish the numbers in all drawings and the Texas Lotto Report records the reported jackpot amount for each drawing. Powerball doesn't publish the distribution of numbers that players pick, but it's possible to get a glimpse by looking at the drawings that have corresponded with jackpot winners. If you pick all the common numbers, if those are the randomly selected winners, you'll be sharing the prize. That's because people tend to cluster their number choices, and Quick Pick doesn't let you avoid those common numbers. And that's among the nearly 300 million possible combinations! As pointed out in the New York Daily News, state and federal governments, as well as lottery officials, have a vested interest in selling you duplicate tickets.Įven if you're not putting your life savings (and then some) into the lottery, you're still better off picking your numbers by hand. If you go all in and buy 20,000 tickets, you have a 50/50 chance of having repeat sets.
The problem is it's impossible to avoid getting duplicate sets of numbers, which don't help at all. Powerball works as a drawing of five balls from a bin of 69 white balls and one red ball from a separate bin of 26. Quick Pick works by giving you combinations of numbers automatically so you don't have to fill in the little bubbles.
So how can you avoid splitting the prize with someone else?įor one thing, don't be lazy and take a bunch of Quick Pick tickets. Split it three ways and your expected value drops below $1.40, a return on investment of negative 47 percent. With one jackpot winner (as well as a number of lesser prizes) the expected value of a $2 Powerball ticket is $3.50, a solid investment.īut dividing the jackpot cash in two, the expected value of your ticket drops to $1.91, less than the $2 you shelled out in the first place. The problem is the "expected value" of your ticket. If you split the cash value of $930 million with one other person, that's still a $465 million jingle. With more people playing, the chances of having multiple winners rises dramatically. The biggest danger (aside from simply not winning) is that you'll have to split the big prize if you're lucky enough to score. The drawing is random, so there's nothing you can do to improve your chances of winning, aside from breaking the bank by spending $600 million on all 292 million possible ticket combinations ( which, we've discovered, isn't feasible.) That $1.5 billion is an estimate partly based on how many people are expected to buy tickets, so there's going to be literally millions of tickets you're competing against. With the estimated jackpot for Wednesday night's Powerball drawing a walloping $1.5 billion, lottery regulars and novices alike are flocking to their corner stores hoping to get a piece of the big prize.
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