Powerball How to Play: 3 Methods to Win
With the Powerball hitting an all time high of $500 million, many are heading to buy their tickets. According to experts, there is a 60 percent chance of someone winning this time, but that hasn't stopped a few hopefuls from trying to improve their odds.
With a building frenzy surrounding the jackpot, some have suggested that there are definitely strategies to increase the odds. One strategy involves tracking.
Tracking
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"Numbers that appear often in a certain game are called hot numbers. Some players will play these hot numbers exclusively on the assumption that since they have appeared often in the past, they should appear again in the future," TLC explained.
Making the strategy more complex, trackers also follow "cold numbers" or ones that haven't hit in a long time. The idea is similar to roulette, if a black number hasn't hit in five rounds it seems like a safe bet to throw money on black.
Doubters of this method might also want to note that the very first winner to ever take home the Texas Lotto Jackpot was a tracker.
Wheeling
A second technique is called "wheeling." Wheeling involves playing the same set of numbers from multiple tickets, in different arrangements.
"Wheeling consists of making up a master list of your best picks, then, using a coded system, playing them in different combinations in a sort of round-robin. Some wheels even carry specific win guarantees," TLC confirmed.
What may shock some is that there are actually wheel experts from whom you can purchase your own wheel. Of course if all of that sounds like too much work, you can head for the office pool instead.
Pooling
The "pooling" method involves a number of people getting together to share the expense of tickets in order to buy more tickets. However, don't forget that means sharing the jackpot too, although it may not be too terrible to share 6 million with a couple of people.
Despite such strategies and the many others that exist, some mathematicians say that such efforts are in vain.
"Some numbers do seem to definitely appear more than others comparing the standard deviation," Matthew Vea, an army reservist and programmer said. "However, that said, I do joke that if that kind of analysis truly did produce a winning result, I would be a millionaire by now. The fact that I have a day job shows there's no predicting the lottery."
Not all agree though, including Richard Lustig, who has won the lottery seven times in the past 20 years.
"Luck has absolutely nothing to do with it," he said in an interview with Fox 4. "How can anybody in their right mind say this guy's won seven times he's just a lucky guy? Come on. Nobody can be that lucky."
