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Lotteries are in the news again, fueled by eye-popping jackpots that get them lots of free publicity. But it’s worth remembering that winning the lottery is still a long shot, despite bigger prizes and lower odds than ever.<\/p>\n
People just plain like to gamble. That’s one reason why they keep playing the lottery, even though there are many more reasons to stop. But a bigger issue is that the state-run games are run as businesses with a goal of maximizing revenues. As such, they’re at cross-purposes with the public interest.<\/p>\n
That’s because the games rely on super-sized jackpots to drive ticket sales and generate press coverage, which creates a self-fulfilling cycle of rising jackpots and growing chances that someone will win them. In the past, lottery proceeds helped build roads and ports, fund churches and even subsidize Protestant colonial settlements. Later, George Washington sponsored a lottery to raise money to finance his campaign for the presidency.<\/p>\n
A lot of people follow lottery tips to improve their chances, such as selecting numbers that represent significant dates in their lives or buying Quick Picks. But such advice doesn’t actually improve the odds of winning. Even if you bought a million tickets, the odds of hitting the jackpot are essentially epsilon (i.e., about zero).<\/p>\n
Instead of trying to improve their odds, you should concentrate on maximizing the number of “singletons” — numbers that appear only once on the ticket. This approach increases the probability of a grouping of ones 60-90% of the time, which signals a winning ticket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lotteries are in the news again, fueled by eye-popping jackpots that get them lots of free publicity. But it’s worth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n