Playing Within Your Budget to Win the Lottery

Playing Within Your Budget to Win the Lottery
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Tino_Sundin]Tino Sundin

Running a lottery is the perfect business. That's because when you have enough people playing, the lottery corporation knows almost exactly how much money the lottery will generate and how much it will have to pay out. It's all a statistics game and there's no way for the lottery corporation to lose money. That's why lottery corporations bring in billions in profits.

However, it is not so simple for lottery players. By spending just a few dollars a week playing the lottery, lottery players can statistically figure out how much they will pay out and win/lose, based on lottery odds, over their lifetimes. But, on a week-to-week basis, there's no way to do so. That's because playing a few tickets a week is not a statistically significant amount to calculate probability accurately.

Lottery players can, however, play within their budgets to slightly increase their odds of a higher payout for themselves. Here's how: If a lottery player plays a lottery with a rolling jackpot, like Powerball for example, they could shift their dollars spent on a week-to-week basis. It's easier to explain with an example. So for example, say a player spends $5 per draw on the lottery. In this case, she plays Powerball, which draws twice a week. Let's say that works out to 9 draws a month. That would equal $45 monthly budget for lotteries. Now, let's say that instead of playing $5 on every draw, she spends just $1 on every draw. That would be 9 draws at a dollar and, so, she would have $36 left over. Since the Powerball lottery has a rollover jackpot, she could now use the extra $36 to spend on one big jackpot each month. That would greatly increase her odds of winning the jackpot on that one big draw.

The player in the example used her budget to shift money spent on lotteries when the jackpot is small to more money spent when the jackpot is big. In the example, she still had the same monthly budget, but slightly increased her lifetime expected payout from playing the lottery because she spent more when the jackpot was big and less when the jackpot was small.

Tino writes about [http://www.lotterywinnerbios.blogspot.com]Lotto winners from around the world like, for example, [http://lotterywinnerbios.blogspot.com/2009/05/rebecca-jemison-wins-mega-millions.html]Rebecca Jemison, who won $162 million playing Mega Millions.

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