When it comes to improving your chances of winning the lottery, there are really only two things you can do.
1. Buy more tickets.
2. Improve your odds of winning.
For example, if the odds of winning the lottery jackpot are 1:2,500,000, you can improve your chances of winning to 1:100,000 if you buy 25 wagers. But, for those of us who would prefer to use our brain rather than our money, we use a lottery software program to improve our chances of winning the lottery jackpot before we spend money on wagers.
Obviously, method #2 is preferable because it allows you to stretch your lottery budget while maintaining similar coverage of all possible wagers. In other words, if you can improve your odds of winning to 1:100,000 using various lottery number analysis techniques, then you only have to buy 1 wager to have the same odds. So, if you’re a serious lottery player, purchasing a good lottery software program is a no-brainer. It pays for itself in a couple of weeks.
An intelligent lottery player tries to cover as many of the possible winning wagers as possible. I call this your Lottery Footprint or LFP. Environmentalists use a similar term, Carbon Footprint, to describe the effect each of us has on global warming. However, the environmentalists want a small Carbon Footprint and serious lottery players want a large Lottery Footprint. The larger the LFP the better your chances of winning are.
I’ve created a simple formula for LFP that we can use to compare different lottery strategies. It incorporates both approaches mentioned above. Here’s the formula.
LFP = tickets purchased /# of possible wagers in Millions
Since we would like to control our budget, we will try to keep the Kerry899 numerator small. So, we’ll concentrate on reducing the size of the denominator; the number of possible wagers. In this article we’ll use the Massachusetts Cash WinFall, 6/46 lottery.
Everybody playing the MA646 lottery starts out with 9,366,819 possible wagers from which to choose. For the purposes of using the LFP, we will use 9.366819 in the formula. If the player buys 1 wager:
LFP = 1/9.366819 = 0.107
The easy way to improve our coverage of the MA646 lottery, increase our LFP, would be buy more wagers. For example, buying 25 wagers results in an LFP of 2.67; indicating that our coverage has improved.
But, how does the serious lottery player reduce the number of possible wagers? Simple. It’s called a reduced Play List. Unlike everyone else in Massachusetts who is playing a 6 out of 46 game, our guy is playing a different game. Lets’ suppose that by using his lottery software program to analyze the lottery, he is convinced that the number 38 will not hit in the next drawing. He will not play any wager that has the number 38.
I know, you’re thinking, ‘No big deal.’ and are about to stop reading. BUT, WAIT! It is a big deal. This simple act of removing 1 number from play has removed 1,221,759 wagers from play! That’s over a MILLION wagers. You see, while everyone else in Massachusetts is playing a 6/46 lottery, our guy is playing a 6/45 game. His odds of winning the lottery jackpot are now 1:8,145,060. This is reflected in a 15% improvement in the LFP.