Presenting A Few Thoughts on
Winning the Lottery and
Lottery Proto

You have questions — foremost of course is, "What are my chances of winning the lottery? Will Lottery Proto help me win?"

In the spirit of education and enlightenment, we are here to answer those questions.

Absolutely!!

Lotteries are won regularly, and those winners are people just like you. Put another way, you have as much a chance of winning as those other winners.

Well…

That's a much different question, and requires a bit more exploration.

The answer is a matter of (pregnant pause here for emphasis):

Probability is a number that tells us what chance we have that an event will occur. For instance, if you flip a coin, the probability that you will get heads is 1/2 or one out of two.

It's possible to calculate the probability of any lottery game. Using the Megamillions lottery as an example, you have a selection of five numbers (the white balls), each ranging from 1 to 70, with another special number (the gold Megaball), ranging from 1 to 25.

The probability of getting any single number of a white ball is simple to calculate: it is 1/70 or one out of seventy for each white ball and 1/25 for the Megaball. "Not too bad" you think.

But, you won't win anything with just one white ball (you win a token amount for just the Megaball). You need at least three white balls, or one or more white balls plus a Megaball to win anything significant.

Note: In the following discussion, what we are calculating is the number of possible combinations. The probability is simply one divided by that number. It's easier to implicitly assume that than specify the "one divided by" for each calculation.

The number of possible combinations of more than one white balls is a little trickier to calculate because the numbers don't repeat (if they repeated, it would be simply a matter of multiplying each range of numbers times the next for however many balls you have — essentially rⁿ, if all the ranges are the same)

But, it is a known formula (bear with me, here):

where r is the range for each position, and n is the number of positions (the number of balls selected).

(The exclamation mark — (!) — is the symbol for the factorial operation: you can look that up, if you're interested. It's a button on most scientific calculators.)

Using MegaMillions as an example, again, you have five white balls, each ranging from one to seventy, no repeating numbers (they're drawn from the same pool.) That probability value calculates to much less: plugging the numbers into the formula we get 70!/(5!(70 - 5)!) or 12,103,014 (1/12,103,014 for the probability.)

  → One out of twelve million, one hundred three thousand and fourteen. ←

Now, guessing all five balls will get you a cool million if you can pull it off, but comparatively, you have a much greater probability of getting hit by lightning over a year (average about 1/1,000,000), or getting killed in a plane crash (about 1/5,000,000, depending on the route, time, and other factors).

And, for the record, those disastrous events are considered extremely low probabilities. Low enough that you don't plan (or bet) on them.

That's informative, but to get the jackpot, we have to factor in the gold Megaball, which adds another (actually multiplies another) 1/25 probability (because it's not dependent on the other balls). So multiplying that out gives us 1/302,575,350. One out of three hundred-two million, five hundred and seventy-five thousand, three hundred and fifty.

That probability puts us into the same level as getting hit by a meteor (a recorded event of which has never happened, bye the bye, but there is a probability.)

Yessss, that is true, but the problem is that unless you're willing to spend a fortune, the increase is miniscule. Look at it this way: to guarantee a Megamillions win, you'd have to buy three hundred million, five hundred and seventy-five thousand, three hundred and fifty sets of numbers, all of them different. To reduce that to a 50/50 chance, you have to buy half that number: one hundred fifty million-plus sets.

Thinking more realistically, let's say you wanted to shoot for one hundredth of one percent chance of winning (.0001). That's a bit more than thirty thousand sets. At two bucks a shot, that represents a more than sixty thousand dollar investment.

And you only have a one hundredth of a percent chance of winning with that number of sets.

People try all sorts of strategies to win the lotteries — one of them is to try to analyze past numbers to predict future numbers.

You can try that, but realize that the lottery organizations go to very, very great lengths to insure the numbers are randomly chosen. They use a physical process that blows evenly balanced and uniformly manufactured round balls out of a tumbling cloud of balls.

Randomness does not guarantee that there won't be 'hot' or 'cold' numbers, but it does guarantee that the next draw will not be predicated on anything that has happened in the past.

A typical fallacy people fall into regarding probability is that if an event has not happened in a while — say the number '7' hasn't shown up in the last twenty sets, that it has a greater probability of showing up in the next set. The rule to live by is this:

The number '7' doesn't have any greater chance of showing up in the next draw than it does for any other draw.

That seems counter-intuitive — unfair, even. And it is. But, it is also true.

The short answer is: "No".

The longer answer is that no process, algorithm, or divination can predict the numbers of the next draw of any lottery game (remember: "Probability has no memory, and no conscience").

That is the reality, and anyone who claims otherwise is an out and out fraud.

(As a side note: There are ways of maximizing the probability of winning something reasonable if you happen to get a certain number of hits in the first place. That type of play, known as wheels is beyond the scope of this document — however we might talk about it in the future, as well as provide a way to implement the strategy in Lottery Proto).

What they can do is help you pick numbers. — Lottery Proto, in particular, can help you pick personalized numbers.

That's up to you, but remember, someone wins the lottery. That, too, is a reality.

There is one certainty that you can depend on regarding lottery games: if you don't play, you have zero chance of winning.

Ultimately, you have to view playing the lottery as an extremely high risk, low probability event and allocate your hard-earned funds accordingly (invest is probably not a good term, here...)

Spend only what you can afford to lose: "Can afford to lose" means that losing what you spend does not adversely affect other aspects of your life or finances.

Putting everything into the lottery (or any other chance driven operation such as roulette, craps, slot machines, blackjack, etc.) is an ABSOLUTELY SURE way of going broke.

Anecdote: I have friend who often used to say, "Sometimes I think about walking into a casino and putting everything I have on a roulette number. One thing's for sure: it would change my life, forever — one way or the other."

 

It's a fun quote, and, if you're just looking to change up your life, that's one way to do it. However, having an advanced degree in applied mathematics, he also knew the probabilities — he never tried it.

So, don't do it. Don't fall into the trap of believing, "Just one more roll/one more ticket and I'll win.".

Decide what you can spend up front, what you can comfortably afford to lose, and play accordingly, expecting to lose.

If you win, it's a happy bonus.