A Realistic Look At Lottery Strategies And Winning

A Realistic Look At Lottery Strategies And Winning

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I was motivated to write this article when I read an article about using "expected value" to win the lottery. Being that I am a statistician, I was naturally interested in the topic, but apparently, you don't have to be correct to get published. You can't use expected value as a means to win the lottery. You should only use it to help you decide when to play the lottery.

There are multiple ways that you can look at expected value. For these purposes I will use a simplified version of the expected value. I will not be taking into account the number of people playing the lottery and the chances of one other person winning as well because there is no real way to tell how many people will play any particular drawing.

In a simple version of expected value, you should take your prize amounts divided by the odds of winning that prize level to reach a value for each prize value. For example in a 649 lottery, the odds of picking 3 of 6 winning numbers is 1 in 57. Next, multiply these odds by the dollar value of the prize ($2.00 in this case). This gives us a value of .0351, you will need to repeat these steps for all the prizes up to the jackpot. When you get to the jackpot you will need to sum all of the values that you have come up with and subtract their total from the dollar amount you spent on 1 play on the ticket (most games cost $1.00). This will give you another value that you will need to multiply by the total number of combinations in that lottery (in a 649 lottery it is 13,983,816). For this lottery you would need a jackpot of just over $12.1 Million to justify playing.

This method is only to be used as a guide to determine when the best time to play is because it will not help increase your odds. You can, however, use it as a means to increase your odds. The only proven way to increase your odds is to buy more tickets. So how can you buy more tickets without going broke. It's really simple, don't buy a ticket until the jackpot is high enough to justify buying one. If your odds are 1 in 14 Million, it will generally take 5 or 6 months to reach a good jackpot. If you were to save $2 per week for 6 months, you would have $48 to spend on the lottery. This would increase your odds to 1 in 290,000 and you haven't spent a dime extra.

About the Author:
Knowing when to play the lottery is the key to winning the lottery. At Online Lottery Strategy we have figured out when the best time to play all of the major lotteries are.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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