Mathematician Breaks Down the Best Ways to Win the Lottery | WIRED (2023)

Introduction

The lottery is hard to win. But, is it possible to make it....less hard to win? We spoke with mathematician Skip Garibaldi about how to increase our odds of winning any kind of lottery. Are there any ways to guarantee a lottery win? What if you play EVERY number combination?

Director: Katherine Wzorek
Editor: Louville Moore
Expert: Skip Garibaldi

Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Eric Martinez
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila

Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editors: Andy Morell

Special Thanks: Anna O'Donohue, Maya Dangerfield, Lea Donenberg, Ian Bryant, Sean Dacanay, Wendi Jonassen

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Video

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 did not win anything.

Nothing I got nothing I lost.

But I didn't.

Nothing.

We have 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 level.

And in particular, the Powerball, which keeps on making the news because the jackpots are so big, there are definitely lotteries that are easier to win than other lotteries.

When you gamble normally, a bigger chance of winning means lower payout.

So 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 to return because your odds of winning with red or black bet is 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 equal about 1 in 300 million they're all kinds of Lottery prizes out there.

And some of them are still pretty big, but they're, not a billion dollars next play in certain numbers, you're not going to increase your chances of winning by some strategy about out how you pick the exact numbers that you pick, 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 split it.

So with that perspective in mind, you'd like to pick unpopular numbers, you'd like to pick numbers that other people will pick don't pick dates, for example, because a lot of people gamble based on dates.

Other advice might be.

If you look at the ticket, where you pick your numbers, don't just pick a column of numbers on that ticket, for example, because some people will do that repeat winners, Like, Richard, lusting 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 as 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 crease their odds of winning the lottery? First playing every single number combination in the drawing.

So for Mega Millions and Powerball that's, not really a feasible choice because there's 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.

So in particular in New, South Wales, in 1986, a Syndicate did that in Virginia in 1992 and then of the Irish National Lottery.

Now, in these cases, they didn't actually succeed in getting 100 of the tickets, but they got enough that they got lucky, and they 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 and there's.

Another gotcha, that's really obvious, which is 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 you want a lottery where maybe not a lot of people are buying tickets.

And yet the jackpot is pretty big so there's, a classic example of Oregon 1999.

They had a 18 million dollar jackpot.

And yet they didn't sell that many tickets.

And what that means is is when you buy a ticket in such a drawing you're unlikely to share the jackpot similarly, in the mid-auts in Texas, the Llano Texas had drawings like that as well.

And so looking around for those kinds of drawings, that's one way to increase your expected return on buying a lottery ticket and scratchers can High rate of return is Lottery has 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 gonna 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 they didn't get the big prizes.

And 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 sort of which lottery scratcher ticket games have better payouts right now.

Okay, even if you've watched higher video, it'll think I 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 gonna bet on a four digit number with repeated digits, like one, one, two two or one two one two.

And if you bet a six-way box, if that's all the possible, six possible ways of writing a number with, oh two ones in it and two twos in it.

And if you do that, your odds of winning are one in one thousand, six hundred and sixty seven and in Most states, if you hit that, if you win that bet, you will get eight hundred dollars, which means you got to go to a lottery office.

You probably owns 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.

And there even used to be a game where you're almost guaranteed to win Marge and Jerry Selby ended up winning almost 8 million dollars playing the Massachusetts cash.

Win fall.

They even made a movie about it.

We are betting forty thousand.

You guys drug dealers, no for professional Lottery players in cash windfall.

The way it worked was when the jackpot gotten pretty big.

They would take some of that money and increase the value of the smaller prizes.

So 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 and nine, but you're gonna win a bunch of the lower tier prizes, which are now bigger.

And if they're enough bigger 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 getting lucky.

But I'm, not telling you don't, buy lottery tickets I, personally, buy lottery tickets I, buy them for the fantasy to think for a few days about.

Oh, what happens if I win this, big jackpot and that's really worth something foreign.