Is it better to change your numbers every day or to play the same numbers every time?
It doesn’t matter.
Change them every day. It will keep you from getting bored. However, it doesn’t affect your chances of winning at all.
Because the numbers reset every drawing there is no advantage at all to changing or keeping your numbers.
Best strategy: take the money you spend on your lottery ticket and buy into a nice mutual fund.
Now where’s the fun in that?!
I know that each drawing is an independent event, much like heads on the first flip of a coin, won’t affect the next flip. I was under the impression that the probabilities change when you are looking at a set of events rather than a single event.
For example. If you compare 1 flip of a coin to 10 flips of a coin, the probability of getting at least 1 heads are very different. For a single flip, the probability is 50%, for the set of 10 flips, the probability is 99%.
By the same token, if we examine the lottery picks after each drawing, then there is no discernable difference, however, if we examine using the same numbers every time before we start any lottery draws, the results could be dramatically different. So I ask again, is it better to switch every time, or is the advantage gained from keeping the same numbers so miniscule as to not make a difference?
There is no advantage to be had, period. To use your coin flip analogy, say we flip the coin 10 times, and each time you must guess H or T. I think it’s clear here that it doesn’t matter if you call heads every time, tails every time, or heads sometimes, tails sometimes–each of the 10 times you play, your chance of guessing correctly is exactly 50%.
Of course, there is and advantage in the fact that you are playing 10 times (as opposed to flipping the coin only once). You’re much more likely to guess correctly at least once out of the 10 times than if you only had one chance to guess correctly. This has everything to do with playing multiple times, and nothing to do with how you arrange your guesses. Similarly, you’re more likely to win the lottery the more often you play, but it doesn’t matter if you play the same numbers every time, or switch numbers every pick.
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About the only thing you can do increase your expected winnings (besides not playing) is to pick uncommon numbers. Should you win, you don’t want to split the pot with other people. For that reason, you may want to focus on numbers above 31 (since many folks like to pick birthdays) and uncommon sequences like 32,33,34,35,36.
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The Master speaks:
Explain why a generous majority of winning tickets are quick pick as opposed to chosen numbers.
Well, I can think of a couple possible reasons, but first I’d like to know if that’s even true. You got a cite for that, metroshane? Preferably one that also mentions the percentage of total tickets bought that are quick picks?
Not from powerball.com
I was afraid you were going to ask that. It seems my cite is no longer findable…so I take back the remark.
Yes, most lotto winners are quick pick players, and yes; the reason is that most lotto players use quick picks. The percentage when I checked was within .004 of the proportions for the history of the VA Lotto game. (A number of years ago.)
Most lotto winners in VA are from the southeastern portion of the state. Once again, that’s where the most lotto tickets are sold.
Buy one ticket, so you can daydream, which is the only reasonable value to a lottery ticket.
Never establish a set of numbers that are “your numbers!”
This has nothing to do with the fact that your numbers are not more likely to come up. But, if you have a set of numbers, you have introduced the possibility that you will not play them on the day that sequence is drawn.
A tragedy that is only possible if you set yourself up for it.
Get change for a dollar, and put it in a bucket. Over the decades your chance of getting a rare coin are better than your chance of winning the lotto.
Tris
I can’t parse this at all. If it has nothing to do with the chances of your number coming up, what’s your point?
All this means is that if you skip a day, and your favorite numbers come up on that, you know that you would have won if you had played. But if you pick random numbers each day, and you skip playing a day that a winner is drawn, then you will never know whether you would have won had you played that day. So avoiding a favorite set up numbers keeps you from having that :smack: feeling for the rest of your life, but has nothing to do with whether you’ll win.
Is the pain of not winning the random lottery any particular day equal to the pain of having “your numbers” come up on a day you were too hungover to play them? Trisk isn’t talking about winning, since your odds don’t change for that, but the cost of inevitable lossing, to your ego mainly.
I have a strategy that actually “works”!
Since the value of the lottery changes over time, the reasonable thing to do is to wait for the payout to be greater than the odds against you.
For example, if it were a “coin flip” lotto of just picking heads or tails from an unbiased coin and cost $1 to play, wait until the jackpot is more than $2 and the odds are in your favor.
Go a step further and take the randomness out of it. Bet $1 on BOTH tails AND heads. It’ll cost you $2 and you’ll automatically win the more than $2 prize no matter what comes up.
Things get a bit more complicated when it comes to the lotto. Let’s look at the NY Lotto. It has you pick six numbers in the range 1 to 59. Therefore there are:
59 * 58 * 57 * 56 * 55 * 54 = 32,441,381,280 different combinations.
You get two number combinations per $1 bet, so it will cost $16,220,690,640 to bet all the combinations.
Therefore you’ll have to wait until the total prize pool is at least greater than $16 Billion.
However, lest you eagerly await that day (which would require there to be no top award winners for the next 78 years at the apparant default rate of $2,000,000 per drawing) remember that if there is more than one winning ticket, the prize amount is divided among all the winners. So before putting the plan into action, don’t forget to multiply the necessary amount by the number of people likely to win (which will include all of the people also using the same method you are).
In other words, don’t hold your breath, hold your $1.
It wouldn’t be quite that bad; you forgot to divide by 6! to account for different permutations of the same six number combination. Instead, there will be 45,057,474 different combinations.
I agree with everything else you said.
Your plan wouldn’t work anyway, in reality, petre. Let’s assume a lottery ticket machine can print out 100 tickets per minute (I don’t know the actual speed, but 1 per second seems about right, so lets use a faster figure just for fun). To bet all 32,441,381,280 combinations at two per ticket, you need to print out 16,220,690,640 ticket, which at the specified rate would take 308 years.