Here’s another truth vs. myth question to test your lottery smarts: Are easy picks luckier?
A lot of people seem to think so, but it’s a myth. Every play in our lotto games (Powerball®, Mega Millions®, etc.) has the same odds of winning, whether you choose your own numbers or buy an easy pick.
You’re likely already familiar with the terms, but just to cover the bases, in lotto games, you have the option of choosing the numbers printed on your ticket or letting the lottery terminal randomly choose the numbers for you. A play with numbers selected by the lottery terminal is called an easy pick. A ticket with numbers you choose yourself is called a manual play.
Today, more people choose easy picks. A lot more people. In some drawings, more than 90 percent of the plays purchased in Powerball and Mega Millions are easy picks.
With that huge percentage of easy pick tickets being purchased, more winners also come from easy picks. That does not mean they’re luckier, it just means there are a lot more of them.
Whether you buy an easy pick or choose your own numbers, the odds of winning are the same for every ticket in a lotto game. That’s because the odds are based upon all of the possible combinations of numbers available to play in the game.
In Powerball, for example, the odds of winning the jackpot are always about 1 in 292.2 million because that’s how many different ways you can combine the numbers available in the game to make a play. The numbers on your play are one of those 292.2 million combinations. The winning numbers selected in the drawing also are one of those combinations. That’s why there are odds of 1 in 292.2 million that the numbers on your ticket will match the winning numbers in the drawing.
Those odds never change, no matter how many people are playing.
So, if you want to choose your own numbers, go ahead. If you’d rather ask for an easy pick, that’s fine, too. Your odds of winning a prize will be the same no matter which way you go.
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