Lottery Strategies and Tips

Don't do this.

Choosing numbers in this way won't increase your chances of winning, but the will increase your chances of taking home a sharply reduced prize if you do happen to win. Selecting numbers in mathematical patterns is extremely popular. That means you will share your prize with multiple winners, reducing the amount of money you will receive. You might win a $30 million jackpot, but if 5,000 people chose the same number, you'll be getting only $6,000.

Believe it, circumstances of multiple winners are not unusual. On June 7, 1986, the combination 08-15-22-29-36-43 was drawn - a combination in which each number was seven digits higher than the previous one. There were 14,697 winning tickets with that combination.

• If you have lottery winning, those losing tickets can get you valuable tax deductions. For instance, if you win $1,000, but have $600 worth of losing tickets, you can itemize those losses and only pay taxes on $400 worth of lottery winnings. Lottery losses can be used as deductions to offset winnings for the same year in which they were purchased.
   
• The losing tickets may give you another chance to win. Sometimes, states will carry out promotions in which players send in losing tickets to be qualified for special contests or drawings.

There is no doubt that the more tickets you buy, the more chances you have to win. But keep in mind that those chances are still astronomical, even if you buy tickets in bulk.

For example, the odds of winning the jackpot of the multi-state Powerball is 1 in 146,107,962. Say you buy 10,000 tickets. Yes, you've increased your chances a thousandfold over someone who buys 10 chances, but your odds of winning the jackpot are still 1 in 14,610. That means you still have a 99.99 percent chance of not winning the jackpot. Even if you spend $100,000 on tickets, your chances of walking away empty-handed is still 99.9 percent.

If you've made up your mind to spend a large amount of money on tickets, here's an important tip. You'll be better off if you use a Wheeling System to select your numbers instead of Quick Pick or random selection. This increases your coverage of possible winning numbers.

Also, expand your resources by combining with friends, coworkers and relatives to form Lotto Pools. You can use LottoStrategies.com's Odds Calculator to determine the odds of winning the various state and multi-state lotto games.
 

Whenever a story runs in the newspaper or television about someone winning a multi-million dollar prize, someone will invariably complain that they never have that same kind of luck. Most of those complainers, though, never test their luck because they never play! Yes, your chances of winning a big prize are small, but they're the same as everyone else's.

And, actually, by using many of the tips, strategies and systems found on LottoStrategies.com, your chances of winning can be significantly better than that of your fellow lottery players.