How can you increase your chances of winning Mega Millions, Powerball or Florida Lotto?
Someone in Florida won $1.58 billion, with a b, in Mega Millions. The Powerball hit $1 billion, again. All that money is just sitting there, waiting for you and your plans of filling a pool with it and jumping in, Scrooge-McDuck-style, except for one annoying thing.
All those other people who also want to win. Kind of rude, really.
The odds against winning the top prize on these lotteries are, as you've been told again and again and again, astronomical. They tell us you're more likely to be bitten by a shark or struck by lightning than win the lottery, but since Florida is the shark bite capital of the world and the lightning capital of the U.S., we like those odds.
But, with the understanding that winning might be a little tough, how can we improve those odds? What are the magic tricks and secret strategies to score life-changing amounts of cash? Here you go, and don't tell anyone else.
What to do if you win: Ultimate guide to the Florida Lottery, Powerball and Mega Millions
How can I increase my chances of winning the Florida Lotto, Powerball or Mega Millions?
Buy more tickets.
That's it, really.
Does buying more Powerball and/or Mega Millions tickets work?
Sort of? But not really.
“The only way to really increase the odds of winning any lottery is to buy more tickets. The more tickets you buy, the more chances you have to win,” said Nicholas Kapoor, a professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Technically, buying more tickets does increase your odds. But the odds are so incredibly against you that picking up 10 tickets instead of five on a Friday night are, mathematically, utterly insignificant. The odds for winning the Powerball actually got a bit tougher in 2015 and Mega Millions followed suit in 2018.
What are the odds of winning the lottery in Florida?
Florida Lotto: The odds of getting all six numbers right are 1 in 22,957,480.
Powerball: You have a 1 in 292.2 million chance to match all five numbers plus the Powerball.
Mega Millions: You have a 1 in 302,575,350 chance to match all five white balls plus the gold Mega Ball.
To put that in the proper perspective — since shark bites and lightning are too commonplace in these parts — there were 290.8 million vehicles registered to drivers in the United States as of September 2022, according to job site Zippia.
Winning the lottery is like if someone hid a sack of money in the glove compartment of one specific car, truck, SUV, or van, driving or parked or abandoned somewhere across all 50 states (including Alaska and Hawaii), and you somehow managed to guess which one it was in.
With numbers like that, guessing 10, 100, or even 100,000 individual vehicles to try to find the right one doesn't make picking it much more likely, does it? The odds of winning the Powerball or Mega Millions are slightly worse than that.
Of course, the odds are better to win the Florida Lotto. That one would be just a bit less likely than picking a specific child out of the 22.9 million children in the U.S. aged 0-5, as of 2021 (per Statista.com).
There are plenty of tips to increase your chances, but they don't help. “I've seen it all and those tips are usually technically true but useless, or are just not true,” said Larry Lesser, a math professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who maintains a website on lottery literacy and has even written a parody version of Kenny Rogers hit song "The Gambler" to illustrate his point.
What you can do, however, is increase the odds that if you do win, you get to keep more of the money.
What lottery numbers should I pick to win more of the money?
Here, you can make a difference. If you win the Florida Lotto, Powerball or Mega Millions, you have to split your wealth with anyone else who picked the same numbers. If you pick numbers that fewer people are also likely to choose, you won't increase your chances of winning even a little bit but you will increase your chances that if you do win, you'll be the only one.
Select random numbers or buy Quick Picks. The drawing is random anyway, this helps you avoid patterns other people might choose.
Include numbers higher than 31. People tend to play birthdays and anniversaries, so they don't pick higher numbers as often.
Avoid sequences lots of people pick, like 1-2-3-4-5-6.
Never play numbers you find in a fortune cookie message unless you want to split your jackpot with 110 other people.
Just buy scratch-off games. You won't have the chance for any mega big jackpots, but your odds of winning a million bucks or more in a scratch-off game are quite a bit better. Still bad, but better.
Does it matter where you buy Florida Lotto, Mega Millions and Powerball tickets?
Nope. While it can sometimes seem that certain places such as Publix and 7-Eleven seem to pay off more than others, it's because they sell more tickets, according to Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman.
Can you spot patterns by studying winning lottery numbers?
“There is no pattern,” Glickman said. “It’s entirely random.”
You can find patterns in winning numbers, actually, since humans can find patterns in anything, but they won't help you predict future winning numbers in the slightest. Here are some odd coincidences we found while looking at recent Powerball and Mega Millions winning numbers.
Should I play the Florida Lotto, Powerball or Mega Millions?
Sure. Just go in with your eyes open, don't spend more than you can easily afford to lose, and don't make financial or retirement plans based on your surefire numbers. The fun of playing and speculating what you'd do with your newfound wealth is worth a few or 20 bucks to a lot of people, so why not?
It's cheap to buy a dream. Even a temporary one.
Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY, contributed to this story.
C. A. Bridges is a Digital Producer for the USA TODAY Network, working with multiple newsrooms across Florida. Local journalists work hard to keep you informed about the things you care about, and you can support them by subscribing to your local news organization. Read more articles by Chris here and follow him on Twitter at @cabridges
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Mega Millions, Powerball: What are odds of winning lottery in Florida?
