"Chance of Winning For Powerball, you pick five random numbers out of the digits 1 through 69, plus a Powerball number from 1 to 26. This math is simple: With a single ticket, your chance of winning is one in 292,201,338. If you buy two tickets and run different numbers, your odds are two in 292,201,338not much better!and so on. You may think, Okay, I'm going all out this time. I'm spending $50 to buy 25 tickets. Your chance is now 25 out of 292 million, which is still, sorry to say, infinitesimal."
"Playing Different Numbers What about the idea that you should play different numbers week to week? People like to use their birthday or the date of an anniversary or other special numbers. Go for it. A set of any six numbers for Powerball has exactly the same chance of winningor, well, most likely losingthis week as that same set of numbers has next week. Each draw is a new day and has nothing to do with prior draws. Perhaps the most famous case of this happened in reverse: In 2009 the Bulgarian national lottery randomly selected the winning numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42. Four days later, when the next drawing was held, the same six numbers came up."
The next Powerball drawing carries an estimated $1.3 billion jackpot. A single $2 Powerball ticket has odds of one in 292,201,338. Purchasing multiple distinct tickets increases the probability linearly but remains vanishingly small even with dozens of tickets. Each Powerball draw is independent, so choosing the same or different numbers in different weeks does not change the odds per draw. Rare coincidences of repeated winning numbers can occur by chance, as happened in Bulgaria in 2009. Coordinating a massive ticket buy can guarantee a win in theory, but the required scale and math are daunting; a guaranteed win once occurred in Virginia in 1992.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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