Once the question of fraud has been thoroughly put to bed, people start asking more sensible questions about strategies and ways to win. These questions are always more fun than the others, and not just because they don’t involve me doing prison time.
When we start talking about the strategies to win the lottery, we are now stepping into the self-help lottery book territory. Hundreds of books and millions of dollars get spent every year to try and find a way to legally get one over on the lottery process. The topics of these books range from complicated mathematics to basic probability, to spiritual divination and almost all of them are not very helpful. When you see the system from the inside out and understand how all the pieces fit together, almost all of these books are humorous. There are a select few that caught my eye as being either interesting and useful, which I will discuss later in another chapter.
The thing that these books talk about, and promise to help you beat, are the odds. It really all comes down to what odds are you playing against. Your Powerball or Mega Millions odds are going to be in the tens of millions to win the grand prize whereas a state lottery may be in the hundreds of thousands or low millions. You have to weigh the potential payoff versus the odds of winning and the payout. But no matter how you weigh the big jackpots, they are always geared toward taking in more money than they pay out. That’s the system and it’s rigged against you.
I know of several daily draw games that have lower jackpots, but the odds of winning is much higher. Due to the small jackpots these games are far less attractive than the larger rolling jackpots. What would you prefer, a few hundred dollars or hundreds of millions? And the tickets usually cost the same. The difference is with the daily games you get more numbers for the same money, which means more chances to win, and the odds of winning are improved. There are whole books devoted to number theory and how to pick winning numbers, so I’ll let the experts deal with the complicated numbers. As for my experience, there’s only one way that seems to play out in the long run and that’s a simple high/low strategy. More on that later.
Scratch tickets are a little different than the drawing games. You can try to come up with a bunch of different strategies with these but if your methods involve buying low money tickets I don’t care what your system is, it will fail. Dollar scratchers are called sucker tickets and rightly so. They are low cost, low payout options that will bankrupt most people. The top prizes on the sucker tickets are barely worth trying to win ($500-1000) unless you are really down and out, which in that case you shouldn’t be buying scratch tickets anyways. They are meant to prey on the poor and needy who are looking for a quick score. They are meant to lure impulse buyers into thinking they can get rich quick. The amount that you would win wouldn’t be worth the money you spend.
If you are going to play scratch tickets, try to find the less commonly played games like $10 tickets. For some reason, the ten dollar levels rarely sell out so more prizes are available for the taking. They are too high for impulse buys but not nearly as high as the $20 tickets that more people than you would think purchase on a whim. If your state offers them, I would recommend you look for these types of games, they offer the best chance of actually paying out on your investment.
But you have to remember, that it’s still a lottery and even if you have better odds, the odds are still not always in your favor. If you play a little smarter, however, you can at least bump those odds up a little.