The Powerball jackpot currently sits at $460 million, one of the largest ever. But the pot isn’t that big—even if you bought every combination, you’d lose out, by a lot.
There are 292,201,338 possible Powerball number combinations. Each ticket costs $2, meaning you’d need more than $584.4 million to guarantee a victory. If you take into account that the lump sum of today’s drawing is $291 million, you’d be spending a little less than double your pre-tax winnings.
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What’s a better way? Well, If I knew I wouldn’t be working at Lifehacker, writing this article. But, lottonumbers.com does track the most common numbers pulled, so you could give those a shot. You could buy a few tickets to (ever so slightly) increase your odds, have an office pool, or let a computer pick numbers for you.
Or you could just ignore Powerball. Again, the odds are 1 in 292.2 million that a single ticket will win. You’d be better off investing your $2—assuming a 6.6% rate of return, you’d end up with $4 in 10 years. That’s double your money!
from Lifehacker http://bit.ly/2lWjcjW
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