It seems as though there are tons of different ways to pick lottery numbers. Plenty of players have a method or strategy for choosing their numbers, and they stick with it. Others are more than happy to change things up with every ticket.
When the Powerball jackpot swells to exciting amounts, and people who don’t normally play start buying up tickets, many are confronted with one important question: what’s the secret to choosing winning Powerball numbers?
If you’re curious to the answer, too, or perhaps set in your ways and just want to learn something new, read on for our tips to choosing Powerball combos.
While statistically, there isn’t a winning advantage to playing computer-generated random numbers, if you do win, the odds are you’ll win more. Firstly, random numbers won’t give you an advantage, per se, because they’re no more or less likely to be chosen over any other set of Powerball numbers.
Here’s the “but.” With randomly generated numbers, the odds of two players having the same numbers is significantly small. For some people, picking random numbers takes the excitement out of the game. After all, a QuickPick option isn’t half as fun as stringing together dates that are important to you.
Plenty of people say they play Powerball in spite of the odds, though, not because of them. While delegating your number combinations to an algorithm may seem to run counter to the hope that compels you to play in the first place, you do have the same amount of chance as playing your favourite numbers.
Every now and then we hear of bigger Powerball winners who say they’ve played numbers that popped into their head, they had a dream about, or they just had a gut feeling about.
It’s great that these people acted and won. It’s hard to say just how well trusting your gut will work for a win but having a lucky or good feeling might just work in your favour. After all, if you want any chance of winning, you’ve got to play, so you might as well go with your gut. If certain numbers seem to be calling out to you, go ahead and answer.
On the other side of the spectrum, there’s numerology. While players who use their gut or even statistical methods to pick their Powerball numbers rely on good feelings or mathematical principles, players whose number choices are guided by numerology are going on good faith.
Using numerology for your lottery numbers is about finding your personal, true or lucky numbers and playing them for the draw. These numbers can be anything like anniversaries, birthdays or other special dates. They can also be numbers that seem to reoccur in your life at particular moments. Numerologists often use formulas to convert numbers like dates with the year, month and day into user-friendly numbers that fit into a lottery ticket.
There are those numbers that are chosen a lot more than others, but it doesn’t mean that others are never chosen. These are called overdue numbers. If any of your favourite numbers (like 2, 5, 46, 9 or 36 for example) are in the overdue list, it might be worth playing them to see if they come up.
While the secret to picking great Powerball tickets mostly revolves around your preferred method, the odds of winning something really increase when you buy more tickets. Of course, you should avoid spending any money on lottery tickets that you’ve allocated for expenses like your mortgage, groceries, and your kid’s school fees. But if you really do want to win at least a little something, buying more tickets (or even joining a syndicate) is a sure-fire way to increase your chances.