by Eric Lannak

Created on: February 06, 2011   Last Updated: February 07, 2011

Lottery games, where a player purchases a set of numbers in hopes they’ll match the prize winning numbers, are played all over the world. Over 100 nations sponsor lotteries, with the biggest ( Japan's Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank Lottery), selling $7.9 billion (USD) worth of tickets in 2001. The UK, Spain, and France also have very large games.

But the U.S. undoubtedly has the biggest games in the world, with the Powerball and MegaMillions games topping the charts.

WHAT ARE YOUR CHANCES?

It’s often said your chances of winning the lottery are worse than your chances of getting hit by lightening.  On the surface this might seem true, because your chance of winning the top Powerball prize is 1 in 195,249,054, while your odds of getting hit by lightning in any given year are around 1 in 500,000.

But the payoffs show this comparison is silly. Even if you only counted big payoffs, 1,136 people hit the jackpot on North American lotteries and another 4,520 won $100,000 or more. On the other hand, about 500 were struck by lightning. Obviously, a lot more people hit the lottery than were hit by lightning bolts.

That may still seem like stiff odds, if only 5000+ people hit the big jackpots, but remember lottery odds vary with the jackpot. Smaller games can pay 1 in 5 players. And if you don’t play you have NO chance of winning. 1-in-195 million is better than no-chance-at-all.

HOW TO PICK WINNERS

Most lotteries offer players the choice between selecting the numbers themselves or letting the vendor’s machine pick them. It’s a “six of one, half dozen of another” situation, because any given set of numbers has the same odds as any other set on any given day. About 70% of North American players buy “quick pick” machine-selected tickets, and about 70% of prizes are won on quick pick tickets.

Playing a system can make you feel more involved with your play, but the cold fact is no one set of numbers has better odds than any other. The odds and numbers involved are far too large for statistical glitches to offer any system an advantage.

There is, however, one minor way to “play” the system. Some lottery systems draw a main set of numbers from one tumbler and a single number from the other. In the Powerball and MegaMillions games these single numbers drawn from the separate bin are called the Power Ball or Mega Ball. Power Balls go up to 39, and Mega Balls to

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