Tim Chartier, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Davidson College in North Carolina, likes to think about it this way: Winning the lottery is the equivalent of flipping heads on a coin 28 times in a row. Twenty-eight times!
: Winning the lottery is the equivalent of flipping heads on a coin 28 times in a row. Twenty-eight times!Another way to visualize it, Chartier says, is to have someone look back at the past nine years, pick one second and then ask someone else to guess the second they chose. The chances of picking the correct second are about the same as winning the lottery: one in 300 million.“No, I've never played,” Chartier says.
For Powerball, winners pick five different numbers from 1 to 69 for the white balls and one number between 1 and 26 for the red Powerball. To calculate the odds, there are 11,238,513 possible combinations of choosing five different numbers from 1 to 69. Multiply that by 26, and you get the 292,201,338 to 1 figure.There are, however, a few things you can do to improve your chances.
“You do improve your odds when you buy more tickets,” Chartier says. “If you buy 100 tickets, you are 100 times more likely to win. But it's equivalent to me saying you get 100 guesses for that one second that I chose from the past nine years.” And picking random numbers rather than the ones you always play increases the odds that you don't have to share the jackpot.
“We have a tendency to pick similar numbers, because we often base them on things like birthdays and so forth,” Chartier says. “So picking random numbers really increases the odds that if you win, you won't have to share."
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