Winning the lottery is a pipe dream right?  Well, there are lot of people who would disagree with you.  Everyday there is a couple jackpot winners in the world. Still doesn’t sound promising I admit but there are a few things that you can do to increase your chances of winning the lottery.  You will have to choose which lottery to play, when to play it, and decide how much to play.

First thing to do is to set up a lottery budget.  You will be setting up a budget so you don’t overdo it and go broke playing the lottery.  No matter how you play it, the odds are always against you.  Figure out how much money you spend on the lottery per week and set it aside in an envelope or jar.  You will only be playing the lottery when the jackpot reaches a large enough amount to justify playing.

Now you will have to decide which lottery you are going to play.  Stay away from lotteries like the Powerball or Mega-Millions.  The odds of winning one of these games are so terrible that you will never be able to affect them enough to make it worth playing.  Stick with a classic 6/49 style lotto.  This would be a lottery with six balls and forty-nine numbers.  The odds of winning a lottery like this is just less than 1 in 14 million while the odds of winning the Powerball is 1 in 190 million.

If you have picked the right game to play, it is also important to decide when to play the game.  Every lottery that has a rising jackpot has a point where it is more reasonable to play than before.  I use expected value to determine when to play the lottery.  Expected value is like it sounds.  It is the expected value of your dollar when you bet on a game.  Most lottery games start out with an expected value of .50.  This means that between all of the winners of the lottery from the lowest to the grand prize will make fifty cents on every dollar spent.  When the jackpot reaches a certain level the expected value will become 1.  This is when you should consider playing the lottery.  By this time you will have accumulated enough money to greatly improve your odds.  But how does this really improve your odds?

This part is a little hard to believe.  It’s basic math really.  In a 6/49 lottery there are just under 14 million combinations therefore if you were to pick a group of different numbers it would increase your odds of winning.  Take for instance if you bought ten lottery tickets instead of one.  Your odds of winning would be 1 in 1.4 million.  If you bought 100 tickets your odds would be 1 in 140,000.  All this can be done without spending any more money than you already are on the lottery.