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The Powerball lottery is the biggest thing on the planet right now, and it’s all in thanks to the large amount of money you’d win. When celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Amy Schumer are admitting that they’re buying tickets, that’s how you know the jackpot is legitimate. [lead image via Scott Olson / Getty Images]
But while everyone’s talking about what they’d do with the winnings, not enough people are asking the important question: “How to win the Powerball.”
We’re hoping to answer that question for you right now… Just don’t get your hopes up too soon. In order to understand how to win you’re going to need to understand the finer points of Powerball, lottery, and how to best increase your chances.
How To Play Powerball
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Let’s start from the top–Powerball is very simple. Each ticket costs $2 and the sales cut off 59 minutes from drawings, which occur every Wednesday and Saturday night at 10:59 PM EST. Some states may end the sales of Powerball tickets a little earlier.
For each Powerball ticket you buy, either you or a computer pick five numbers (each ranging from 1-69) plus a final red Powerball number (ranges from 1-26).
Powerball players also have the chance to spend an extra dollar to opt into the Power Play. By choosing the Power Play option, you’re giving yourself a an increased payout if you win any of the prizes (except the main jackpot). That payment will be described below.
Powerball Prizes
The prize that everyone hopes to win is the Grand Prize jackpot, which is won by correctly picking all five numbers in any order and the Powerball number. That jackpot is then paid out in one of two ways:
• The first way is to be paid in a cash lump sum. If you choose this option (most people do) you get paid the cash and then pay state and federal taxes. It is safe to assume that you get to keep 50% of your winnings.
• The second, less popular way of getting your money is in an annuitized prize paid out over 29 years. If you choose the annuity, then you can invest the cash amount pre-tax, less an immediate first payment (more to invest means more earnings). With the annuity, you get an annual payment that is increased by 5% each year to keep up with the cost of living. If the winner dies, the money is then paid out to their designated beneficiary.
But there are other ways to win in Powerball besides just the jackpot. By matching all five white balls and guessing the red Powerball incorrectly, you still win the second prize which is $1,000,000 cash lump sum payout. There is no annuity option for the second prize.
Of course, if more than one prize winner picks the same numbers, you are then asked to split the prize pool between the number of winners.
Even besides the Grand Prize and Second Prize, there are even more ways you can win. Check out this chart below for all the way to win:
Five white balls + red Powerball: Grand Prize
Five white balls: $1,000,000
Four white balls + red Powerball: $50,000
Four white balls: $100
Three white balls + red Powerball: $100
Three white balls: $7
Two white balls + red Powerball: $7
One white ball + red Powerball: $4
Red Powerball: $4
And now back to the Power Play we discussed earlier an for an added $1 cost per ticket.
If you chose the Power Play option and win the Grand Prize, nothing changes. You win hundreds of millions of dollars and go home excited you never need to work again.
If you chose the Power Play option and won second prize, your given a lump sum of $2,000,000 (2x what you would have earned otherwise). If you won any of the other prizes besides the Grand or Second Prize, the value of your earnings increases by a multiple of either 2X, 3X, 4X, or 5X, depending on the number that is drawn. In special circumstances where the Grand Prize is less than $150 million, a 10X multiplier is added to the drawing.
Powerball Odds (Actual Math)
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Now that you’ve seen all the different ways to win, you’re probably feeling pretty good about your chances, no? Well then let’s get right into the disappointing news. Your chances of picking all five white numbers and the red Powerball is 1-in-292 million, regardless of how much the jackpot is worth.
How do we arrive at that number? Because there are 11,238,513 different combinations of the right five white balls–in any order–that get picked. You then have to multiply that 11 million+ by 26 because for every five-ball combination, there are 26 different Powerballs.
11,238,513 x 26 = 292,201,338
If that doesn’t make sense in your head, let’s take a look at some real-world examples of odds, shall we?
• Just a little bit better than having your name randomly drawn from a pool of everyone in the United States.
• You are 246 times more likely of being struck by lightning (one-in-1.19 million).
• As an amateur golfer, you’re 23,376 times more likely to shoot a hole-in-one.
Of course, things become increasingly easier to win the smaller prizes as you go down. Feel free to refer to the chart below for the odds:
Grand Prize: 1 in 292,201,338.00
$1,000,000: 1 in 11,688,053.52
$50,000: 1 in 913,129.18
$100: 1 in 36,525.17
$100: 1 in 14,494.11
$7: 1 in 579.76
$7: 1 in 701.33
$4: 1 in 91.98
$4: 1 in 38.32
How To Win The Powerball: Part 1–Luck
OK, so now we know all there is to know about the Powerball, let’s talk about how to win it.
The first, and best option is to get lucky. Spend an amount of money you can afford to lose and somehow end up being the luckiest person on earth as you have just become a multi-millionaire. But what numbers should you pick?
Great question, but you’re not going to like the answer. No matter what numbers you pick, your choices have close to zero effect on your chances of winning. That being said, you can always look at past results for a clue or two.
Fox News reports that 70% of Powerball winners used Quick Picks, or had the computer randomly select numbers for them. We like the number 70% a hell of a lot more than we do 1-in-292 million, so having the computer choose your numbers seems like your best bet.
But maybe you’re not the kind of person to leave it up to chance. Maybe you need to pick your own numbers. Well if you feel like destiny is your hands, the most important thing you can do is pick your numbers and always stick to them when you play Powerball. That’s the advice “Lottery expert” Richard Lustig, who’s allegedly won seven lotteries, gives. The problem is that while he calls himself a “lottery expert” others call him a “fraud” and “get rich quick hack.” So there’s that.
The only solid point we’ve read in lottery literature regarding which numbers you choose is that it’s actually better for you to use the Quick Pick computer method because there’s a chance that if a number is lucky for you, someone else may feel that number is lucky for them. And if you both win the grand prize, your jackpot is split–which sucks (relatively speaking). So in short, the benefit of letting the computer choose your numbers only kicks in once you win.
How To Win The Powerball: Part 2–Brute Force
But wait, there’s more! There is a way to guarantee that you win the Powerball. Anything of substance you read on the Powerball will tell you that “The only way to increase your chances of winning the Powerball is to buy more tickets.” This is true.
So what if you bought all the possible combinations? You’d win, no questions asked. So let’s get started buying all those tickets!
Number of Tickets:
First up, you’re going to need to buy 292,201,338 lottery tickets–one for every possible option. Since you need to make sure you pick every single combination once, you need to skip the Quick Pick option and choose the numbers yourself. So assuming you can buy one Powerball ticket every minute (which is probably a stretch), you’re going to need to gather 608,752 people to give eight hours (a full work day) of their time within a three day period (Wednesday to Saturday) to buy lottery tickets. No problem! You’re probably already acquainted with like 150 people on Facebook. Now you just need to convince all of them to give up their lives and then meet an additional 600K+ people and convince them.
Cost of Tickets:
Since each ticket costs $2, you’re going to need to spend a total of $584,402,676 on the tickets alone–not including the cost it’ll take people to go along with your crazy idea.
Return on Investment:
Since you’re going to have to spend $584 million on the Powerball regardless of the jackpot, you’re going to want to ensure that the Grand Prize lump cash sum is over that (after accounting for taxes)
The largest Powerball jackpot ever was at $1.3 Billion in January 2016, so the net gain on that would figure out to be about $715,597,324 (before taxes) or $214,679,197 (after taxes). If those were the only factors, that would make for a somewhat smart investment.
The problem is that there can multiple winners. The moment you split the earnings with one person, you’ve just lost hundreds of dollars on the investment. The more winners, the more you lose. Sure you’ve also racked up some of the smaller winnings along the way (a maximum of something around $1.75 million on the generous side) but that’s nothing compared to hundreds of millions.
And if it’s not apparent to you yet, the number of people playing the lottery increases drastically the higher the payout–meaning that the more money in the jackpot the more chances that people are going to split the pot.
Powerball and Lottery Winners
But don’t let the fact that winning Powerball is as close to a waste of money as possible stop you from playing, let the fact that winning the Powerball is almost guaranteed to ruin your life stop you from playing.
• Michael Carrol, a UK garbage man, won a prize of $15.5 million back in 2002. The man with a criminal then spent the next year sleeping with as many women as possible… not including his wife. Now admittedly sleeping with four hookers a day (his average) became exhausting, which is exactly why he went through $3K worth of crack cocaine every day. It wasn’t long before his wife and daughter left him. After ten years of partying, Michael wound up back on welfare with no money left.
“I’ve slept with over 4,000 women,” he told The Mirror in 2012 after blowing every penny of his fortune on vice. “I once slept with more than 20 in one day.
• Florida man Abraham Shakespeare won $30 million and vanished just three years after his winnings. It was discovered that he’d been buried under a concrete slab after being shot to death. He’d already given nearly all of his winnings away when a con-woman stole the rest of the $1.8 million and murdered him.
And these are far from the only people who’s life has gotten worse after they won the lottery.
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