Eric Chemi of CNBC – Wednesday’s Powerball payout is going to be well over $1 billion, so every single extra winner that shares in the pot could be worth a lot of money. Trying to cut out a few of them from the final stake will be worth millions to the eventual winner.
Powerball officials said the jackpot had grown to $1.3 billion after no one won when the numbers were drawn on Saturday evening just before 11 pm ET.
We can safely say, through statistics, that each Powerball number comes up randomly. Yet if a potential millionaire doesn’t wish to share his or her bounty with any others, there is real data to show which numbers to avoid.
Yes, it’s true.
A lot of people pick “lucky numbers,” mainly birthdays, to fill out their lottery sheets. Be warned: These numbers are a threat to your chances of winning a prize that you in fact could keep all to yourself. These lucky figures are anything but, and should be avoided.
Look at the chart below. This comes from an analysis of England’s lottery picks. Notice the spikes of 7, 17, and 27. That’s because way too many people are picking these 7-based lucky numbers. You don’t want that.
You’ll also see that numbers 31 and under are picked more often than larger numbers. That’s because of birthdays—so stay away from those too.
The unlucky number 13 is under-represented as a choice. So are typically uninteresting numbers like 32, 34, 40, and 46. But if you don’t want to share your prize, you need to do the opposite of that. In fact, you should be picking these unloved numbers. Those are the ones everybody else is avoiding.
And you should definitely not pick your numbers from a fortune cookie, if only because there have been several cases of mass winners because of that. One example is from March 2005, when 110 players won the same prize—because a fortune cookie said to grab 22-28-32-33-39.
Don’t be one of those unlucky winners this time around. And you need to keep the power in your own hands to pick these low-share numbers, so don’t let the computer pick possible bad numbers for you.
Find the unloved numbers nobody else wants. Your chances of winning will still be the same, but your chances of winning big will be higher. And that’s what the lottery is all about.
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