Seven-Time Lottery Winner’s Powerball Tips: Snake Oil

COMMENTARY | Seven-time lottery grand prize winner Richard Lustig is promoting his book about lottery winning in time for the huge Powerball drawing, according to the Huffington Post. He claims to have rules which will increase your chances of winning big. I believe his tips are snake oil.

One of Lustig’s key tips is to pick your own numbers instead of having a lottery machine do an “easy pick.” The seven-time lottery winner’s tip ignores a basic standard of probability and statistics. When using a random number generator, such as the machine which picks the winning numbers, any random set of numbers will have the same chance of coming up as any other random set of numbers. If you purchase a ticket using the “easy pick” system, your chances of winning the Powerball lottery are 175 million to one. If you pick the numbers yourself, your odds are still 175 million to one.

Lustig believes you should research numbers which hit before because this gives you a better chance of winning. I have heard this theory before and it states that some balls in the lottery might be weighted differently and have a greater/lesser chance of hitting. This would work if lottery officials never changed the balls. Over time, statistically speaking, all numbers will have the same chance of coming up in the lottery.

The seven-time lottery winner also believes you should come up with 10 number combinations and play those every single time. Ten numbers would lower the odds to 17.5 million to one (175 divided by 10), but would not help to guarantee a win. If you played the same 10 numbers every time the Powerball was drawn, one of your numbers should hit once in the next 168,269.23 years.

To reach the previous number, I divided 175 million by 10, which is the odds of winning, divided by the number of number combinations Lustig suggests. I then divided the total by 104 since it is the number of times the Powerball lottery is drawn each year (2 draws a week for 52 weeks). If you only purchased one ticket each time, the probability would be that your number would hit once in the next 1,682,692 years. Lustig’s snake oil increases your chances an insignificant amount over the long term.