These are the games that can be deciphered using the singleton method. They’re also typically among the cheapest lottery tickets, and have the lowest payouts, so you can buy several to practice. [1] X Research source
The digits you’re looking for won’t be the same–that would mean they would appear more than once. Remember, you’re looking for numbers that appear only once.
60% may not sound like a lot, but the average scratch-off card has a 30% chance of winning, so you’ve doubled your chances. Over a large group of tickets, this can yield a significant profit.
In other words, this assumes the powerball lottery works like a fantasy football pool: five people throw in five bucks, the winner gets $25.
Account for any non-cash prizes by taking their cash value into account, and convert any annuities (annual distributions of prize money) into a lump sum for the purposes of this calculation.
One example of this was the Missouri Lottery’s promotion in the daily Pick 3. Normally a player has a 1/1000 chance of winning a $600 prize, making a $1 ticket worth only $0. 60. The promotion was to draw a second winning combination on one randomly selected day of the week. Originally, the drawing to determine whether the bonus would occur that day held six white balls and one orange, but on the last day of the week, all six white balls had been removed, leaving only the orange ball and ensuring a double drawing on the last day. [3] X Research source This doubled the value of tickets for that drawing and converted them from an expected 40 percent loss to a 20 percent gain. See table 1 below for how the expected value varied that week.
The Massachusetts lottery imposed purchase limits after it was discovered that their Cash Win-fail game had a positive expected value after a jackpot was rolled down to increase the payouts for lower level prizes. In the Mega Millions multi-state lottery, jackpots are split equally among all winners who match all numbers. If a player could ensure that he wouldn’t have to split the jackpot, Mega Millions becomes a smart bet whenever the jackpot exceeds about $420 million, but this calculation doesn’t account for the possibility of a split jackpot. It has been theorized that the ticket buying frenzies as the jackpot rises increases the likelihood of multiple winners sufficiently that the jackpot can never get large enough to give a ticket a positive expected value. [4] X Research source
