/biz/ - Business & Finance

Can you pay more money to put more numbers on the ticket?
Here in Italy most games have what's called "playing a system", where you pay the equivalent of the number of tickets that you'd have to buy to get all the possible combinations of the N numbers you put. This gives you much better odds than spending the same money on single tickets every draw (so you're better off putting that money in a piggy bank and spending it all at once when the jackpot gets huge).
I don't play the lotto so I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that it results in you actually buying all the individual tickets for the combinations, rather than a single big ticket, which is advantageous because you can get the sum of all the (far more likely) small prizes from combinations of 3 or 4 numbers.
So not only you're significantly more likely to get the jackpot (still an extremely small chance), but you're much more likely to break even or to make a small profit.
It might be different with the MegaMillions game, but normally a higher jackpot also means that the smaller prizes are more substantial, so you can calculate the point where the small prizes are big enough to be worth the risk to you (which you can further reduce by playing as many numbers as you can afford).
If you can't do this, just buy all the combinations individually.

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Can you pay more money to put more numbers on the ticket?
Her in Italy most games have what's called "playing a system", where you pay the equivalent of the number of tickets that you'd have to buy to get all the possible combinations of the N numbers you put. This gives you much better odds than spending the same money on single tickets every draw (so you're better off putting that money in a piggy bank and spending it all at once when the jackpot gets huge).
I don't play the lotto so I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that it results in you actually buying all the individual tickets for the combinations, rather than a single big ticket, which is advantageous because you can get the sum of all the (far more likely) small prizes from combinations of 3 or 4 numbers.
So not only you're significantly more likely to get the jackpot (still an extremely small chance), but you're much more likely to break even or to make a small profit.
It might be different with the MegaMillions game, but normally a higher jackpot also means that the smaller prizes are more substantial, so you can calculate the point where the small prizes are big enough to be worth the risk to you (which you can further reduce by playing as many numbers as you can afford).
If you can't do this, just buy all the combinations individually.

Then there's the whole "which numbers to play", which I haven't done any research or math on, but I don't think it makes any difference. Just use random.org to generate some numbers or google which numbers haven't been drawn for the longest, I don't think it should matter, and if there is a way to find numbers that are even slightly more likely to be picked, it's either way above our head, or you already know how to calculate that, so I have no advice on that.

It's still gambling though, so nothing is guaranteed and you could very well win zero even with the increased chances, so don't spend any money on this that you're not ok with losing.