How to Choose Lottery Numbers?

Leave it all in Lady Luck’s Hands

You have heard it many times. Statistics prove it too. Most lottery wins are due to random numbers. Why? First of all, because many people use the Quick Pick option when buying their lottery tickets, either because they believe in luck or because they consider Quick Pick is the best way to choose lotto numbers. And they are right! The Quick Pick option proposes some randomly chose number. Truth be told, when you let the machine choose numbers at random, you are less likely to have the same numbers as other players.

On the other hand, there are those who advise against using Quick Pick as a way of picking lotto numbers. This is the case for the seven-times lottery winner, Richard Lustig. He advises players not to opt for the Quick Pick option. His logic is that if you choose your lotto numbers yourself you are less likely to duplicate number combinations of recent lottery winners. This all depends on whether you’ve done your homework before choosing the right lotto numbers.

Marie Holmes, a single mother from a small town in Coastal North Carolina, won a third of the US$56.4 Crore Powerball jackpot on February 11, 2015 because her Quick-Picked ticket matched the winning numbers of the draw. Checking the Powerball results must have been amazing for her! A year before that, in February 2014, a lucky retiree from Northern California became the sole winner of another enormous Powerball jackpot of US$42.5 Crore as the quick pick ticket he bought while having lunch at Subway featured the winning numbers 1, 17, 35, 49, 54 and Powerball 34 of the February 19 draw. B. Raymond Buxton kept his win a secret for almost a month and a half, and eventually came forward on April Fools’ Day.

However, Quick-Picking your numbers can sometimes be tricky. Gloria Mackenzie certainly made the headlines when she came forward to claim the US$59.05 Crore Powerball jackpot she won on the May 18, 2013 draw. All those who had played envied the 84-year-old woman whose ticket matched the winning numbers. But, one draw participant had even more reasons to be upset: when she saw Gloria, she realized that the winner was actually the nice old lady she let pass in front of her. As both of them played with Quick-Picked numbers, the prize could have belonged to her.

Use Statistics

Do you believe that history can repeat itself? Then, you should follow the hot and cold numbers trends. Powerball odds may help you get the good numbers. But, even here players come with different theories. Some prefer to bet on hot numbers, with the belief that they are likely to come up again. Others like to go with the cold numbers, following the assumption that if something hasn’t happened in a long time, it is likely to happen soon. There are even those who would choose a combination of hot and cold numbers.

Make it Personal

For a good number of lottery fans the numbers they enter the draw with have a personal significance, such as birthdays of family members and/or close friends. There’s one problem with this strategy though – it limits the numbers you choose to 31 only.

Another favorite tactic among lottery fans is going for what they consider to be their lucky numbers. There’s no logic to this method, it’s more of a superstition, but studies have been made around lucky numbers. An experimental physicist by the name of Jonathan Clarke determined that numbers that end in a ‘7’ digit are actually the most popular numbers. Do you have enough lucky numbers to fill a lottery ticket though? Chances are that you don’t.

Does this work? Ira Curry, one of the two lucky ticket holders who split the Mega Millions jackpot of US$636 Million on December 2013 used a combination of the above-mentioned two strategies to pick the lotto numbers that changed her life. Here winning ticket contained family birthdays and the lucky no. 7, which was the winning Mega Ball of the draw.

Using the same numbers (21-24-25-40-43 and the Mega Ball 12), Judy Marsh from Virginia won the Mega Millions twice: first in 2008, when she scooped the second prize worth US$2,50,000 and again in September 2016, when she only missed the Mega Ball. How did she come up with this set of lucky numbers? They consist of her beloved late mom’s birth date and the date she passed away. Then, for the remaining numbers, she selected random numbers.

Make the Lottery Ticket Look Nice

Maybe you haven’t thought about this, but the aesthetic approach has actually worked for players in the past! What does this method consist of? Literally looking at your lottery ticket and choosing numbers in a pattern that looks pretty. A true and funny story on this topic dates from 1995: in the 9th draw of the U.K. National Lottery, 133 players won the £160 Lakh jackpot prize! Strange coincidence? Or, was there something more to it? When the numbers were analyzed, it showed that all of the winning numbers lay within the three middle columns of the ticket. Also, no numbers lay in the same row nor adjacently.

Believe in Your Dreams

Another way is to bet on numbers that appear in your dreams. Even though this approach is not mathematical or scientific, there is something to be said about the significance of dreams in our lives. The US$18.9 Crore Mega Millions jackpot winner from Maryland claims that the night before the lucky draw took place, he dreamt that his family members were telling him the winning numbers. He went out and purchased 10 US Mega Millions tickets  the very next morning, using different combinations of these numbers (as well as his birth date). One of these tickets was the winning one in the October 1, 2013 draw and turned him into a multi-millionaire. Now that’s a fulfilling lotto dream!

And this is no the only case of people dreaming their lottery numbers! Another lucky player became a millionaire scooping the 2nd Powerball prize worth US$10 Lakh in the record-setting draw of January 13, 2016, when the jackpot was reaching US$158 Crore. He entered the draw with Quick-Picked numbers and only chose the Powerball number 15 because of a dream he had. However, the Powerball number of the draw was 10. As he had all the other winning numbers of the draw, this is what stood between him and a slice of the record Powerball jackpot. However, he did fulfill his dream of winning the lottery, even though not the jackpot!