How to Win the Lottery

It’s the dream of countless people from around the world to win the lottery. Whether you’re in the UK, USA, Australia, Europe, or anywhere else with a national lottery, the thought of instant millions keeps us all lined up week after week buying tickets.

Last week, I got an email from a long-time reader of GamblingSites.org asking how to win the lottery for sure. With permission, I’ve republished the email here.

Hey guys,

I’m Pauline from London, and I’ve been reading the GamblingSites.org blog for years now. I’ve found lots of useful gambling tips and now consider myself an educated gambler thanks to what you publish. The piece on casino house edge was particularly eye-opening – I never knew about it before I read that post.

I’d like to make a request if I may. Can you tell me how to win the lottery? I know that it comes down to picking the lucky numbers, but are there any lotto tips and tricks I can use to improve my chances? I’ve been playing for years, and I’ve only won small prizes a few times.

Thanks for any lotto advice you can give me in advance.

Sincerely, Pauline

Pauline, it would be a pleasure to answer your request. These are the best lottery tips and tricks I’m aware of. I’ve also added in lots of other useful information about the lottery for the benefit of other readers.

How to Win the Lottery Explained

Before I share lottery strategies and techniques with you, I’d like to cover the basics of how to win it from a practical point of view. As a long-term player, Pauline, you can skip this section.

The lottery is a simple game, it doesn’t require complex higher-level thought or the memorization of rulebooks. While each lottery game is unique in its own right, the objective is always the same. To win cash prizes, the numbers printed on your ticket should match those drawn from the lottery machine.

In the UK National Lottery, for example, you win the jackpot if you match all six numbers drawn from the machine. You can also win life-changing jackpots if you match five numbers plus the bonus ball. The UK lotto also has a guaranteed weekly millionaire raffle code, so if you don’t win the main draw, that’s your second chance.

Now that you understand how to win the lottery, let’s look at some lotto tactics.

Let’s Start With What Doesn’t Work

As a long-term researcher and writer on everything related to gambling, I’ve seen some ridiculous theories floating around about how to win lottery games.

For example, I recently read an entire article on how to win the lottery using “the secret.” This secret is the law of attraction, which is now a well-understood concept. But it won’t work for winning money through the lottery.

This kind of theory really bothers me as someone who understands how the lottery works and the odds which govern it. These theories are designed to take advantage of good people who are perhaps a little naive. Sorry, but wishful thinking or prayers to win the lottery won’t help you pick the winning numbers.

Don’t Try to Win the Lottery by Cheating

I’ve also seen everything from mailing lists run by “insiders” who claim they’ll send you the winning numbers a few days in advance, to cheat codes for online lottery games which claim you just have to pick a certain sequence of numbers to tap into the jackpots.

Cheating the lottery is absolutely futile.

Do you really believe that gaming companies worth hundreds of millions hire engineers which build cheat codes into online lotto games?

Or that national lotteries regulated by entire government departments have fixers who will send you the numbers for a $100 subscription? Come on!

Forget cheating to win the lottery. The only person who will get rich from these schemes is the person selling you the cheat code or system.

Now that we’ve dismissed wishful thinking and cheating, which will both fail every time, let’s look at how you can actually improve your chances of winning the lottery.

Winning the Lottery – Tips and Tricks

I’ve spent a lot of precious time and energy researching lotto tips and tricks, and I can tell you that 99% of them are junk. It seems like every other month a new lotto system is released. Very few of them work, because they all aim to do something impossible—alter the odds of lottery games.

Do you know what your odds are of winning the jackpot in the UK national lottery? 1 in 45,057,474. You couldn’t alter those odds with any lotto system, no matter what the seller tells you.

So, what can you do to improve your chances of winning the lottery? There are a few commonsense tips and tricks which work.

Maximize the Number of Tickets You Buy

Maximizing the number of tickets you buy will naturally give you more opportunities to win. Even doubling your number of weekly tickets from one to two literally doubles your opportunities to win.

But some players choose to take things further and join a lottery syndicate. They get together with close friends, family members, or work colleagues and buy as many tickets as possible each week.

What’s the point of this? Well, there’s a good chance that 10 of you will be able to buy many more tickets than one of you. The agreement in most lottery syndicates is to split the jackpot if you win it no matter who buys the actual winning ticket.

The trick is to find the right number of people to join. You don’t want too many, because that will diminish your jackpot. However, you still want to give yourself a good chance of winning, so at least five people buying a couple of tickets each is recommended.

Of course, you should never form a lotto syndicate with people you don’t trust. Make sure someone trustworthy holds the tickets. It wouldn’t be the first time someone has disappeared holding a multimillion-dollar winning lotto ticket.

Pick Hot and Preferably High Numbers

Statistically speaking, over a long enough timeline, every lottery number has the same odds of being picked. For example, in the UK national lottery, which has 59 numbers, each number has a 1 in 59 chance of being picked in each draw.

Yet, there’s no denying that some numbers are picked more than average.

I’m not sure how I feel about hot and cold lottery number systems. I’m still exploring them, but when you compare these most-picked numbers to the least picked numbers like 51 and 53 (picked 40 times each at the time of writing), it’s difficult to put that vast difference down to luck alone. Maybe there really are hot and cold numbers after all?

So, why did I say “and preferably high numbers”? Well, that one comes down to common sense. Since most people play lucky numbers which tend to be people’s birthdays, and there are only a potential 31 days in any given month, it means that you will dramatically reduce the possibility of having to share the jackpot if you win it. The downside is that lots of smart lotto players are catching onto this fact, so I’m not sure how long this trick will remain useful for.

Play Games With the Best Odds

Remember how I said you can’t alter the odds of the lotto? I wasn’t lying, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do your research and play the games with the best possible odds.

Let’s look at some popular UK lotto games and the odds of winning the jackpot:

• The Euromillions jackpot odds are 1 in 139,838,160.
• The UK National Lottery jackpot odds are 1 in 45,057,454.
• The odds of winning an average 10-spot keno game are 1 in 8,911,712.
• The Thunderball jackpot odds are 1 in 8,060,598.

These are just some of the most popular lottery games in the UK. You can usually find out the jackpot odds of any other game you’re interested in with a small amount of digging. By contrast, the odds of winning a progressive jackpot are about 1 in 50 million.

As you can see, the odds of winning the Thunderball jackpot with five numbers + the Thunderball are your best shot at winning the lottery. Of course, the better the odds are, the smaller the jackpots usually are. There’s a reason why the Euromillions jackpots are the biggest ever won.

What you do with this information is your call. Would you rather a much smaller shot at a colossal jackpot, or a better shot at a smaller but still significant jackpot? Don’t forget that even the plain old normal UK lottery can instantly bestow millions upon you. I’d take a shot at that with better odds any day, but that’s just me. Picking the game with the most favourable odds is the best way to win the lottery by far.

So, Pauline, I hope this has answered your question about how to win the lottery. I hope it has made clear that this is a game of math and chance, and that there is no secret formula on how to win the lottery. You just have to pick the game with the best odds and buy as many tickets as possible. The rest is down to blind chance.

I’d like to finish off by answering some other reader questions I’ve received over the years. Most of them revolve around what to do after you win, which I, unfortunately, don’t have first-hand experience with, but I’ve been able to find accurate information through research.

Lotto Games – Some Other Reader Questions