Popular Powerball strategy debunked by math professor as jackpot soars to historic sum
- Monday evening’s Powerball drawing features a $905 million jackpot, making it the 16th-largest lottery prize in American history and the eighth-largest in Powerball history after 42 consecutive drawings without a grand prize winner.
- Ahead of the draw, USC mathematics Professor Emeritus Ken Alexander warned that buying tickets at a location where winning tickets with large jackpots have been sold in the past will not increase a player’s chance of landing the jackpot.
- “The chance that a given place will sell a winning lottery ticket is just related to how many tickets they sell,” Alexander told City News Service.
- Players wanting a better chance of avoiding sharing a jackpot should choose numbers that aren’t selected as often, Alexander said. Lottery players frequently choose the date of their birthdays as one of their numbers, so numbers higher than 31 would be played less, Alexander said.
- The odds of matching all five numbers and the Powerball number is 1 in 292.2 million, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association, which conducts the game. The overall chance of winning a prize is 1 in 24.9.
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