- [Narrator] 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.
- I have won $5, so I'm up by $2.
[sad trombone music]
- [Narrator] 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
in 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 300,000,000.
- [Narrator] Let's look at that one more time.
Your chances of winning the Powerball Jackpot equal
about one in 300,000,000.
- There are all kinds of lottery prizes out there
and some of them are still pretty big,
but they're not $1,000,000,000.
- [Narrator] Next, playing certain numbers.
- Well, you're not gonna increase your chances
of winning by some strategy
about 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.
- [Narrator] Repeat winners, like Richard Lustig, won
over $1,000,000, advocated for playing sequential numbers.
- Now, this won't increase your odds of winning.
That kind of thing is gonna give you the same chance
of winning 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.
- [Narrator] So, what are some ways that people attempt
to increase 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
'cause there's 300,000,000 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 with 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.
- [Narrator] Now, if you do actually decide to do this,
there are a bit of logistics involved.
- You're actually gonna 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
'cause 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.
- [Narrator] 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 in 1999.
They had an $18,000,000 jackpot
and yet, they didn't sell that many tickets,
and what that means is when you buy a ticket
in such a drawing, you're unlikely to share the jackpot.
Similarly, in mid-aughts 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.
- [Narrator] And scratchers can have a high rate
of return as well.
- The lottery has printed it out and picked the prizes
in such a way that the total value of the prizes is less
than the amount people are gonna spend on tickets,
so they're gonna 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 scratch off-odds.com
[screen whooshing]
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.
- [Narrator] Okay, so even if you've watched
this entire video and still 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 1122, or 1212,
and if you bet a six-way box,
it bets all the six possible ways
of writing a number with two ones
in it and two twos in it,
and if you do that, your odds of winning are one in 1,667,
and in most states, if you hit that,
if you win that bet, you will get $800,
which means you gotta go to a lottery office.
You probably will lose 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.
- [Narrator] And there even used to be a game where you
were almost guaranteed to win.
Marge and Jerry Selbee ended up winning
almost $8,000,000 playing the Massachusetts Cash Windfall.
They even made a movie about it.
- We are bettin' 40,000.
- You guys drug dealers?
- No!
[objects slamming]
We're professional lottery players.
- In Cash Windfall, the way it worked
was when the jackpot got 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 take the right number,
it's about a one in 9,000,000 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 1,000,000 tickets,
your odds of winning the jackpot are not
so big, one in 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 gonna make money out of your total investment.
[upbeat music]
It's really hard and unusual to be
in a situation where you
could 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.
[upbeat music]