Super 7 tips for the lottery

22 April 2017

By John Marchel

First of all, you should know that lotteries have the worst odds of any form of gambling, with a chance of 1 in 14 million when playing most jackpot games. However, it also promises the greatest potential payoff to the winner with prizes regularly amounting to tens of millions of dollars. Lotteries have several interesting factors. If the jackpot is not won, it normally rolls over into the jackpot for the next drawing. Lotteries are also pari-mutuel games. What that means is there can be multiple winners on any game.

Winners will have to share equally the grand prize. Finally, a jackpot is usually paid out over 20-plus years. The advertised jackpot is naturally the undiscounted sum of 20-plus annual payments. It’s really not that simple to improve your odds of winning the lottery. There’s no question that luck is the major factor when it comes to picking the right numbers.

Having said that, I do have some tips that might help:

(1) Choose a lottery game with the lowest odds, in other words, games with the smallest amount of numbers, like Pick-3 or Daily-5. Your chances of winning will be greatly increased compared to a “Super Lotto” game.

(2) Choose numbers that have the best chance of being drawn. The study of what has happened in the past can help in the future. Go to your state lottery web site and look at past winning numbers. Even thought the numbers are chosen at random, randomly drawn numbers are known to form patterns that are predictable.

(3). While you are at the lottery website, look up your favorite numbers to make sure they haven’t already been picked in the past. If your numbers, that you routinely pick each time, have already won, the odds of hitting the same numbers again are astronomical. If that’s the case, my advice is to pick new ones.

(4) Probability can be important in lottery picking. Consider this, if something rarely happens or if something has never happened before in the history of the lottery, common sense tells you not to expect it to happen just because you bet on it. An example would be picking numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, which many people do pick; however, those numbers have never appeared in that order in any lottery in the U.S. or in any lottery in the world.

(5) Another thing to consider is that everything doesn’t always even out. Many people play a specific number because they think it’s “due.” They have the mistaken notion that when it comes to the lottery, everything has to even out. That simply is not true. During one period in the New York lottery, the number 45 did not show up in 100 drawings.

(6) Some lottery experts say spread you numbers evenly between high and low numbers. This is supposed to help statistically to balance your entry.

(7) Lastly, play the lottery for fun, particularly when the jackpot gets really high. But, and it’s an important but, don’t invest too much of your bankroll on this long-shot game.


BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW

• In the late 1860s, the Havana lottery sold as many tickets in New Orleans as it did in Cuba. Carrier pigeons regularly ferried news of the drawings directly from the Caribbean island to the Louisiana City on the Gulf of Mexico.

• George Washington was a lottery “frequent ticket buyer” who won land in one raffle, five pounds in a 1763 lottery, and 16 pounds in a 1766 drawing.

• It has been estimated that 55% of people in the world buy lottery tickets each year, making it the most popular form of gambling.

• The weekly Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia (Italian lottery), started in the year 1530, brings a yearly revenue to the Italian government of about $75 million.

• The Louisiana Lottery in the late 1800s was operated out of New York City.

• In 1665, the Dutch held a lottery to raise money for the poor in New Amsterdam, the predecessor of New York City.

• Iowa earmarks a portion of the state lottery revenue for a gamblers' assistance fund.

• There was a rumor that the former Soviet Union used to have a million-dollar lottery – the winner got a dollar a year for a million years.