One Powerball number you shouldn’t pick for $160 million draw

Winning the Powerball might just be dumb luck, but there are numbers you should avoid – and numbers you should choose – in order to win bigger.

ANALYSIS

In any jackpot lottery there can come – in theory – a point where it makes sense to play.

All the people who played in previous weeks when it didn’t go off? They stuffed the lottery with money. That money is sitting there, waiting to be won. The value of the prize can be greater than the chance of winning multiplied by the cost of the ticket. Are we at that point yet with Powerball?

We are. The odds of winning Division One are 1 in 134.5 million. The prize has this week jackpotted to $160 million.

I’ve done the maths. A ticket costs $1.21 and if you multiply the prize by the odds of Division One, then add in the other eight divisions, the jackpot would have to be $109 million for the basic analysis to look good. So this week, for the first time, it does.

Thursday’s Powerball is $100 million. Picture: Supplied

But, the basic analysis I described above leads you to a huge mistake. You don’t get the division one prize, you get a share of the prize pool, and sharing the prize is increasingly likely when the prize gets high. There’s always a major surge of ticket-buying when the prize gets high, and that means you should expect to be sharing your prize with other people. For example, last time the prize was over $100 million, there were two winners.

Yes, in theory when the jackpot goes up, you could be buying $1.10 of value for $1, but in reality everyone else senses that too. Half of Australia piles in and dilutes the winnings. Powerball advertise $160 million as if it is your prize, but remember it is a prize pool. Even if you do win Division One, some other schmo could be up there with his hands on your novelty-size cheque.

Sure, sure, sure. But I’m playing anyway, got any tips?

Everyone knows gambling is a losing proposition, and we do it anyway. So here’s my advice if you’re going to play. (You probably are! History says they will sell around eight tickets for every Australian this week). Think of it as harm minimisation.

Don’t choose patterns. Last month in the Philippines, a lottery went really weird. Suddenly there were hundreds of winners sharing the top prize. The reason? The numbers chosen by the random number machine were 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54. You might recognise that as the nine times table: All multiples of nine.

Because lots of people had chosen those numbers, boom, they all won a (tiny) share in the prize. It must be pretty disappointing to think you’ve won the lottery … then discover you’re taking home the price of a small, second-hand car, not the price of a small, second-hand tropical island.

More than 400 people won a lottery jackpot in the Philippines in an October 1, 2022 draw. Picture: Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office/Facebook

I ran an analysis on Australian Powerball winning numbers and prizes since 2018 to see if any patterns were particularly good or bad. Some are better than others.

Choosing numbers including 7, 14, 21, 28 and 35 seems to be a particularly bad idea. Have you heard the urban myth that if you ask people to choose a random number between one and 10 a majority will choose seven? Well it may be true because people like to choose multiples of seven in the lottery, apparently: When those numbers come up there tend to be more winners than normal and they take home lower prizes.

Seven is also a poor choice for your Powerball number. When it comes up, there are more winners and lower prizes in the divisions where you need the Powerball. Since seven is no more likely to be picked than any other number, you’re better off choosing a different number that doesn’t have lots of other people camped out on it. It doesn’t change your odds of winning, but it should lift how much you get back if you do win.

How to improve your payout

If you want to milk every bit of value out of your lottery ticket, your need to choose numbers other people aren’t choosing. One decent method is to do a Quickpick and let the random number generator decide.

Anything you think is an unpredictable anti-pattern – be it

– 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or

– 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 (prime numbers), or

– 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 (the Fibonacci sequence), or

– Your grandma’s birthdate, or

– The numbers of your favourite footballers –

is probably already a popular choice.

The other trick is more psychological: Don’t buy a lot of tickets. The real value of Powerball is imagining what you’ll do with it, whether that is charity, real estate, a boat, a vineyard, or just a colossal F-you to the boss. Whatever makes you grin with glee just thinking of it. You can dream of winning whether you bought a $4.25 standard ticket or the $961 System 12 ticket. Buy just enough tickets to let you dream, and no more.

Remember, most divisions pay truly terrible prizes. Every week, around two-thirds of the people who “win” Powerball win Division Nine. The Division Nine prize is usually around $10. If you found $10 and change on the street you’d barely even mention it to your family when you got home. It’s a pitiful prize for a lottery that advertises such a big headline figure. Division 2 isn’t always that good either. It was $350,000 one week in September, but just $20,000 a few weeks earlier, in August. They love to focus your eyes on the Division One prize, which is truly life-changing money, but that isn’t even given out every week. They flaunt it, then whisk it away, until it is all won in one big jackpot later.

Where *does* the money go?

The Lottery Corporation owns Powerball. Its operations made $350 million in after-tax profit last year. Not too bad. But as the CEO says, they are hardly the only ones clipping the ticket.

“In [the 2022 financial year] The Lottery Corporation’s operations generated $1.7 billion in lottery and Keno taxes for governments.”

That is billion with a B. Yep, lotteries are taxed heavily in Australia, which is part of what makes them such terrible bets compared to, say, playing blackjack.

Here’s what happens when I simulated 50 people playing Powerball each week for a year: They start with a budget of $250 and most go broke, none get ahead.

Still, Australians don’t care.

We are mad for Powerball and other jackpot games – turnover in The Lottery Company’s jackpot games was up 23 per cent last year.

Will Powerball jackpot again this week? Even with the number of people who will be playing, the long odds of winning division one mean another jackpot is still possible.

And if it does, the number of tickets sold next week could set a new a record.

Jason Murphy is an economist | @jasemurphy. He is the author of the book Incentivology.

Originally published as One Powerball number you shouldn’t pick for $160 million draw