Am I more likely to win the lottery by picking the numbers myself or going with easy pick?

Yeah, yeah, I know, statistically it’s more likely to get hit by a meteor or whatever than hit the winning numbers. Better to just take the money you were going to spend on tickets and invest it. Playing the lottery is the “poor man’s tax”. I get it.

But whenever the Megamillions or Powerball payoff goes north of say, $500 million, I figure what the hey, why not buy a few. I enjoy the day or two of that Schroedinger’s Cat sensation that I may or may not be rich beyond my wildest dreams.

I always just do the easy pick though, and I have this nagging feeling that maybe I’m hurting my chances; because what are the odds that the same set of numbers will be picked twice randomly by a machine? But then, if I pick my own numbers, am I not a meat machine just randomly picking numbers, pretty much the same as the lottery machine that picks my numbers for me? Unless of course I have hidden psychic powers that improve my chances…?

Maybe I should pick my own numbers, because with easy picks I’m lucky to get one or two numbers. But maybe tomorrow will be different! Will report back Sunday if I’m a multimillionaire, and you’re all invited to my big win blowout party.

Pretty low, of course. But you already knew that. The fact that it’s a machine doesn’t make anything any worse, because your odds with any other method are equally low.

Where you can make a difference is not in the probability that you’ll win, but in the probability that you’ll have to split the pot, by picking numbers that other humans are less likely to pick. At the very least, you want to avoid numbers that can be parsed as a date, because a lot of people like to play numbers matching their birthday or anniversary or the like.

Humans are bad at picking random numbers. Go with the machine every time.

On the occasion I play the lottery, I just do the quick pick by machine. If I played a particular game every single time, I might pick my own numbers, but what if, one day, I didn’t play for some reason, and my hand-picked numbers won? Aarrgh! That would be a crazy-maker! No, I’m not taking that risk!

Big winners often have elaborate stories about how they picked their numbers, but I’ve also heard people say “I just let the machine pick them.” Works for me.

Good luck. I’m looking forward to the party!

Unless you have some sort of insider knowledge, letting the machine pick is better. People are bad at coming up with random numbers, and it’s more likely that you choose the same numbers as someone else than if you let the machine pick them.

I know, right? In a similar vein, at a former job I was in a lottery club where we all contributed I think $20 a month. After many months of not winning a dime, I got tired of basically flushing a $20 bill down the drain every month and gave it up, but I was terrified that the club would hit the numbers the next month or two afterward.

That is one of the reasons the Christmas lottery (el Gordo) is so successful in Spain: every worker in an office, every member of a sport club, pupils and teachers in every school class etc. gets a sudden attack of FOMO.
Now if the prize money “goes north of say, $500 million” does it not start to make sense to play every single combination?

The high-dollar lotteries in the USA have hundreds of millions of combinations. Even if you had the money to do that, the window to buy a ticket is only a few days long, so you’d need to pre-hire a huge number of people to buy the tickets, which would likely nullify your profits.

It has been attempted with smaller lotteries before, though. The usual response of the state authorities has been to simply make it harder to buy tickets in bulk.

Maybe I don’t understand the mechanics of lotteries as well as I thought. My impression is that every potential combination of numbers is equally likely. If so, then how can it possibly matter whether any given combination is “random” or not?

Because you don’t want to pick the same number as other humans, and so have to split the prize.

That said, I’m not sure if that favors letting the machine pick or not. If I pick my own random numbers, they probably won’t be very random, but I can make sure that I arrange to miss all of the dates. If I let the machine do it, it won’t be biased in any way, including not biased towards dates, but it also won’t be biased away from dates. Are my bad random numbers more likely to match other humans’ bad random numbers, or is the computer’s random numbers that might be dates more likely?

Of course, best of all would be to come up with my own good randomization routine (using a computer or dice or whatever) that’s designed to avoid dates.

I’ve heard some people suggest playing apparently non-random sets like 1-2-3-4-5, on the assumption that although, statistically speaking, it is just as likely to come up as any other combination, most people would assume it is less likely and therefore wouldn’t pick it, lowering the chances that you would have to share the winnings.

One the other hand, others have suggested that for exactly that reason, more people would play it.

:person_shrugging:

I tried to google “most commonly played lotto numbers” to see if people really do play things like 1-2-3-4-5. Unfortunately, all the hits I got seem to be the most common winning numbers. Which is only useful to know if the mechanism used to pick the winning numbers isn’t totally random.

Both of my significant lottery wins were both quick picks. The first time I split a 1 million dollar win. The other winner and I showed up at the lottery headquarters within a few minutes of each other. The first thing this guy asked me was how that I knew his numbers. Told him I didn’t, my ticket was a quick pick, I even showed the the QP on my ticket. Heard him later tell one of the lottery officials that when someone picks their own numbers, that combination should not be able to be picked again. In this case it didn’t matter, I bought my ticket 2 days before he did.

The second win was 4 years ago with the Power Ball game. I remember looking at the numbers on my ticket, 2 low numbers and 3 high numbers. I thought it wouldn’t win. I ended up having the correct Power Ball number (woohoo, I won $3), then I noticed I had the 2 lowest numbers (woohoo, I won $20). And I had the 2 highest numbers, 66 and 67 (Whoa, I just won $50,000). The number drawn that I didn’t have was 25. I had 52 instead. If I had a 25 instead of 52, I would have won 170 million dollars.

Every time I’ve seen a lottery publish anything about the historical distribution of picks they show people do pick such numbers. And in 2020 there were 20 winners of the big pot when the South Africa lottery drew the numbers from 5-10.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times… it just doesn’t matter. If you can show me a controlled scientific study where they proved it made a difference, I’d like to see it.

Sure , you would rather be the only one to pick the winning numbers than to be one of many who picked the winning numbers and have to share a prize.

But if lots of people pick 1,2,3,4 and 5 and I instead pick five random numbers , the fact that I might be the only person who chose those five numbers doesn’t make my numbers more likely to win - my five numbers have the same chance of winning as any other five numbers. It just means that if I win, I won’t have to share.

Right, that’s the whole point.

Saying something over and over doesn’t actually make it true.

What difference are you meaning? If it is picking the winning numbers, then no, it doesn’t give you any advantage. If it is picking unique numbers, that no one else is likely to have picked, it does.

Could you be more specific as to your objection?

The OP was Am I more likely to win the lottery by picking the numbers myself or going with easy pick?

As I said, it just doesn’t matter. Someone prove me wrong.

Assuming the lottery’s random-number generator is genuinely random, it doesn’t make any difference to your chance to win. It might make a difference in how much you get if you do win, because that depends on whether or not other people picked the same numbers. Thus, I’d recommend a strategy that minimizes the chance of duplicating someone else’s picks (e.g. some people tend to use birthdays, so include at least one number higher than 31).

I don’t see how you can do this unless you can see all the other numbers picked. Do you have a way to do that?