Where To Put Your Money If You Win The Lottery

What Are the Odds of Winning the Lottery or Mega Millions?

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Everyone dreams of winning the lottery someday. It's a fantasy that passes the time and makes a dreary day at the office a little better. Many people put in a couple bucks a week to have this daydream, but some will spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in an attempt at increasing their odds of winning. Unfortunately, this doesn't work out as quickly as hoped by those people.

What are your odds of getting the winning numbers in the Mega Millions or Powerball? Let's just start by saying, it's extremely low.

How are Lottery Numbers Picked?

To better understand why your odds of winning the lottery are low, it helps to know how those six lotto numbers are picked each week. Every lottery organization has a particular set of numbers and method, but the process usually follows the same lines for each group.

There are two types of lottery machines:

A gravity mix machine
An air mix machine

During a lotto drawing using the gravity mix machine, solid rubber balls are dropped into a clear mixing chamber from above. These chambers contain paddles that turn and further mix the balls inside. At the bottom is a clear tube that the balls fall into one at a time. The first six balls to enter the tube are the winning numbers.

If the lotto organization uses air mix machines, they drop ping pong balls into a clear mixing chamber. Inside the chamber, the balls are blown around by jets of air. The clear plastic tube is located near the side or top of the machine, and the ping pong balls enter the tube one by one.

General Odds of Winning the Lottery

Classic lotteries include a set of numbers, usually from one to 49, on different balls. Each of the winning numbers contains six numbers from six different balls among those in the mixing chamber. The odds of picking all six numbers correctly on your lottery ticket in these types of games are one in 13,983,816.

With these odds, if you were to buy one lottery ticket a week it could still take up to 269,000 years to win. Now, that's a long time. If you wanted to theoretically speed up the time it takes to win, you'd need to buy roughly 767 lottery tickets a day to win within 50 years. That's still not a guarantee, so don't go spending your life savings on it!

The Odds of Winning the Mega Millions Jackpot

The odds of winning the bigger lotteries are purposely made more difficult, which allows those jackpot values to rise incredibly high. For example, the Mega Millions reached $1,537 billion before it was won on October 23rd, 2018. By the way, this was the largest lottery prize in the world that was won with a single ticket.

According to their website, the odds of picking the Mega Millions winning numbers are one in 302,575,350. Assuming you bought one ticket a week, it would take an estimated 5,818,757 years to win the jackpot. The overall odds of winning any prize are one in 24. You can reasonably expect to get a few small wins a year if you buy one ticket a week.

The Odds of Winning the Powerball Jackpot

Let's also take a look at the odds of winning the Powerball lottery, which is a competing lottery to the Mega Millions. This big lottery also reaches obscenely high values thanks to the increased difficulty of winning. The Powerball reached an all time high of $1,586.5 billion before it was won on January 13th, 2016. By the way, there were three separate winning tickets and the prize was split three ways.

According to the Powerball website, the odds of getting the winning numbers are one in 292,201,338. If you buy one ticket a week, it would take about 5,619,257 years to win. The overall odds for winning any prize are roughly one in 25.

Increasing Your Odds of Winning

If these numbers haven't got you down and you are still eager to win, there are a few ways to increase the odds a little bit. Here's a quick list of ideas:

Buy more tickets. The numbers show that the more tickets you have, the higher the chances of winning. Just remember that the odds are still extremely low.
Join the office pool. By joining a group of people who pool their money to buy lotto tickets you'll have more chances of winning without the increased expenses.
Save up the money you would normally use on one ticket a week and use the savings every few months to buy multiple tickets on one drawing. This increases your odds of winning that prize without spending more money.
Pick your numbers and stick to them. Use the same set of lotto numbers every time you buy a ticket to reduce the number of variables.
Use numbers that are drawn more often. The past winning numbers vary from the lottery to lottery, and the frequency of draw is not far from the average, but every increase helps. For instance, the most frequent Mega Millions numbers are: 2, 17, 31, 39, 4, 46.
Buy your tickets from the luckiest lotto vendors. These places sell way more tickets than average, so the odds of a winner turning up at their store increases.