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is it worth playing the lottery

Is It Worth Playing the Lottery: When to Buy In

VWB Blog 2 years ago 6

Buying lottery tickets comes with the dream of having your life change overnight. However, the actual odds of winning a lottery in the United States are about 1 in 176 million.

With those types of odds and considering that you are much more likely to be struck by lightning, people may be wondering, is it worth playing the lottery?

This brief guide will show you why the lottery is worth considering.

Scratch-Offs

There is actually a simple way to improve your odds of winning when it comes to scratch-offs. All of those games have a limited number of prizes available in their ticket distribution.

So, being aware of this, if you know that 80% of the bigger prizes have been claimed, buying a scratch-off for that particular game may not be the best investment compared to one that just came out.

One way you can do this is to check resources like this for the lottery top prizes remaining. Then, you can know exactly what the number of prizes remaining is for each game.

At the time of writing, one game would clearly stand out here, having over 40,000 prizes still available compared to the next highest game. That one had less than 1,500 prizes left respectively, and most others had less than 20.

Traditional Lottery

After scratch-offs, you have the traditional lottery games such as the Mega Millions and Powerball. The basic premise of these games is to match six numbers on your ticket to win the jackpot. These can be six randomly generated numbers or ones that you choose yourself.

One way to improve your chances is to simply double-check your tickets every time the drawing comes out. This is because people can lose millions of dollars in unclaimed lottery tickets every year.

Another thing to be aware of in traditional lottery games is the frequency of specific numbers drawn. For example, the #3 may have been drawn three times in the last month for the Powerball.

There are resources that let you track how many times each number has been drawn in the last few months. They also tell you what specific numbers came out on a specific day.

Knowing this, you can start tracking these numbers and figure out which numbers are hot and which numbers are cold. If you are superstitious or believe that every number has to get called eventually, you could start playing the numbers that have not been called in a long time.

Also, how you play your numbers is important as well. By that, the point here is to not do things such as playing every number that ends in zero, playing all even numbers, or playing five consecutive numbers.

Those events are even less likely to occur than getting six random numbers, so stick to that.

Is It Worth Playing the Lottery?

Is it worth playing the lottery? Truthfully, if you stick to only putting in cash that you are comfortable losing, it can absolutely be worth it.

If you follow these tips, your odds will improve, and you can figure out how to win the lottery. For more relevant information, check out our Game section.

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