Is It Possible to Guarantee a Jackpot Win: All the Combinations to Cover
What kind of lottery player are you? Do you play just for the fun of it or are you keen to win? If you belong to the second category, you probably dislike the “luck” element of the lottery, and you’re thinking about ways to guarantee a large prize.
To do so, you will need to buy a significant number of lottery combinations to ensure you’re covered for every possibility.
But how big a number of combinations do you need to win the jackpot for sure? And is the purchase of such tickets a financially-sound approach to win the lottery?
Believe it or not, others have asked the same questions.
Some have even gone a step further, and they’ve calculated the number of lottery combinations required to win the jackpot for sure.
Guaranteeing the Jackpot: The Math Behind It
Theoretically, you can make sure you’re going to win the lottery jackpot by buying every single ticket for every numerical combination out there.
The number of tickets required to win 100 percent will depend on the specifics of the game you’re attempting to conquer.
Your chances of winning the lottery are fixed and completely independent of the combinations that others have submitted. This is precisely what makes lotteries hard to win. We want to say they’re impossible to win for sure and we will use Powerball as an example of why.
Powerball from the US is one of the lotteries known for the massive jackpots but also for the incredibly challenging winning odds. To win Powerball, you will have to buy every numerical combination out of the available set.
Powerball is a lottery that features two sets of numbers. You have to choose five numbers in the range of one to 69 and one Powerball number in the range from one to 26. If you buy a single ticket, your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are one in 292,201,338.
The second number in the statistical analysis is the entire set of numerical combinations. Thus, there are over 292 million combinations you will have to buy tickets to ensure winning the jackpot. A Powerball ticket costs two dollars, which means you’ll need to spend over 584 million dollars on winning the Powerball jackpot for sure.
This approach doesn’t make financial sense.
The situation with Mega Millions, another viral US lottery that has spectacular jackpots, is even worse.
Mega Millions has winning odds of one in 302,575,350. To have a ticket that will win the jackpot, you will have to spend over 605 million dollars on the acquisition of all possible numerical combinations.
Even if a lottery isn’t that hard to win, the number of combinations is still way too high to make financial sense. Many countries have 5/35 lotteries, and these are known for much more favorable odds than more giant games like Powerball and Mega Millions. The number of possible combinations for such a game is 324,632. Using the above examples, let’s say a single ticket costs two dollars. You’ll need to spend 649,264 dollars on ensuring the jackpot win. Keep in mind, however, that such games tend to have lower jackpots than the lotteries characterized by more unfavorable odds. As a result, the amount you’re going to win will probably be insufficient to cover the amount you spent on buying every possible ticket out there.
Buying All Lottery Combinations – Not a Good Idea!
The math says it all – you really cannot afford to buy every lottery combination out there. Even if you can, the idea doesn’t make sense. Unless the jackpot is a billion dollars, you will be losing money by opting for such an approach.
All you have to do is make the calculation. How much do you have to spend on all combinations, and what’s the current jackpot? Keep in mind that the advertised amount isn’t usually the one you’re going to get because taxes will be deducted.
Let’s use the Mega Millions jackpot as an illustration as to why this strategy is really, really, really bad.
The Tuesday, October 1, 2019, drawing has an advertised jackpot of 45 million dollars. That’s way too little in comparison to the 605 million dollars you will have to spend on every possible combination. Even the massive 273-million-dollar jackpot that fell on March 1, 2019, isn’t enough to cover the expenditure. You will still be in massive debt, which could potentially interfere with your happiness about winning the lottery jackpot.
A Few Other Possible Complications
There are several other additional complications to consider, even if you have the money to spend on all lottery combinations.
For a start, you don’t know how many other lucky individuals are going to win the jackpot. The calculations above are based on you winning alone. If there’s at least one other winner, the jackpot amount will be cut in half, and you will be losing money once again.
Next, think about the process of buying the tickets.
You have to get millions of lottery tickets, and you have to fill them out by hand. Making sure you haven’t committed mistakes and that you’ve entered every possible numerical combination out there is a large challenge and in our view – completely impossible.
Many lotteries have also put together strategies to prevent such schemes from ever occurring. They have limitations that prohibit the mass printing of tickets. You will have to split your efforts between numerous people because you’ll be incapable of mass buying all of the tickets that you require on your own.
Now imagine going through your stash of tickets and retrieving the one that has won the jackpot. This is another task that could take days to complete.
Finally, imagine the unlikely scenario of somebody else doing the same thing you are doing. In such instances, there will be two guaranteed winners who will have to split the money and who will lose as a result of the strategy.
To sum it up, buying tickets for all possible lottery combinations are possible but not plausible and not as financially safe as some people may think. There are other strategies to boost your chances but guaranteeing the jackpot isn’t feasible. If it were, all lotteries would have gone bankrupt by now.
