About to pick mega millions numbers, and looking for tips that will give you the best odds in the lottery? In this post, we will share our best advice for maximizing your chances of a big payday.
1) Buy more tickets
The rationale behind this one is quite simple: In order to win, you have to play, and play often. When the sole determinant of victory in a game is luck, the more exposure you have to getting lucky, the more likely it is that you actually will.
However, it is important to note that since the odds of winning the jackpot at any given time is very small, it is important to only use money that you can afford to spend on entertainment for tickets.
If you need the money to pay your rent or buy groceries, use it for that instead.
2) Get in on a lotto ticket buying group
You will often find these collectives in workplaces. Everybody in the group takes a turn buying tickets for each other. If a ticket on any given week wins a prize, the proceeds are split between everybody.
Should you be fortunate enough to hit your numbers as a group, you will split the jackpot between everyone that is in good standing. The benefit from playing as a group rather than going it alone is that it reduces your variance during the times when you aren’t winning any cash prizes, making it less costly for the group as a whole when you aren’t winning.
3) Avoid picking too many numbers that correspond to days of the month
Be careful not to take too many numbers between 1-31. The reason for this is due to the fact that many lottery players use birthdays and other landmark days as part of the lucky numbers that they play every week.
As such, the odds of you sharing a lottery win with somebody else is higher if you pick too many numbers between 1 and 31.
4) Don’t pick numbers in sequence
Some lottery draws are physically imperfect. In these cases, physical balls are drawn from tumblers, and are therefore subject to bias, however small it might be.
According to a study, those that pick numbers in a five ball draw where the numbers range between 1 and 55 should pick a number series that adds up to a sum between 104 and 176. 70% of the time, the sum of the winning numbers fell within this range.
The lesson is that you should not pick numbers in sequence (e.g. 1-2-3-4-5, or 51-52-53-54-55). If draws were truly random, it wouldn’t make a difference what numbers you chose, but as this study has shown, the reality of these contests deviates quite a bit from mathematical expectation.