The Odds Don’t Vary With Tickets Sold

We recently got an e-mail from a group of folks who play Powerball® together at work and had a disagreement about the odds in the game. So they contacted us to ask: Do the odds increase, decrease or remain the same depending on how many tickets are sold?

The short answer is that it makes absolutely no difference how many tickets are sold in Powerball or how many states are in the game – the odds stay the same from drawing to drawing. That’s because you’re always playing against the numbers drawn. 

Another way of putting that is to say that the odds in the game are based upon whether the numbers on your ticket match the numbers drawn. And in Powerball, we always draw the five white balls from a pool of 59 and the Powerball from a pool of 39. So, the odds always stay the same.

The only impact that increased sales would have on your odds is that when more tickets are sold for a particular drawing there are better odds that you might have to share the jackpot with another player (assuming you won).