How Often You Should Buy Lottery Tickets For The Best Odds, According To A Statistician

Winning the lottery is a dream of millions. The idea of being able to put the days of working 40 hours a week behind you with more than enough money to retire on a beach somewhere is obviously quite the appealing notion. This being the case, the lottery is without a doubt the most popular form of gambling in the country, with Americans spending as much as $105.26 billion on lottery tickets in 2021 alone. However, seeing as the odds of winning are somewhere in the ballpark of one in 300 million, you are more likely to get attacked by a shark or struck by lightning than claim a winning lotto ticket.

Knowing this, it would appear that the biggest benefactor of the lottery isn't actually the people who win it, but the U.S. government itself. This is not only because of the amount of lottery ticket sales that go into the government's pocket, but also because of the amount that one would have to pay in taxes after winning the lottery. Regardless, what if there was an actual mathematical strategy you could use to buy lottery tickets in order to achieve the best odds of winning? Well, according to a mathematician who won the lottery 14 different times, there is indeed a winning strategy to be played. So without further ado, let's take a look at how often you should buy lottery tickets for the best odds of winning,

A man by the name of Stefan Mandel may just be the luckiest man in history. However, after winning the lottery 14 different times, the Romanian mathematician would suggest quite the opposite. Instead, he stated that winning the lottery was more so a matter of mathematical odds than luck. So who exactly is Mandel, how was he able to win the lottery so many times, and better yet, was what he did even legal?

Mandel is a Holocaust survivor who was born into poverty in Soviet-controlled Romania. In an effort to get his family out of the then-communist country, it was clear that his salary, which was the equivalent of $88 a month, wasn't going to cut it. So instead, Mandel decided he was going to concoct a strategy to win the Romanian lottery. The strategy he used ended up proving effective, and he was able to win 72,000 leu ($7,200) which was enough to get him and his family out of the country and into Australia. However, despite being out of Romania, Mandel wasn't done gaming the system, as he now had access to both the UK and Australian lotteries. So Mandel feverishly went back to work on his winning strategy, which allowed him to go on to win the lottery 12 more times, including a United States lottery in Virginia as well. But what exactly was Mandel's winning strategy, and can it be applied today?

The first step Stefan Mandel used to win the lottery was to figure out the total number of possible winning number combinations. For example, if a lottery ticket requires you to pick six numbers between 1 and 40, there will be close to 4,000,000 combinations. Obviously this is not light work to do. The next step, however, is a bit easier, and requires you to find different lotteries where the reward is more than three times the amount of the number of possible combinations. After that, Stefan would then round up a group of investors to help him pay for all these possible combinations. Once he did that, he would print out upwards of millions of different tickets with all the combinations of numbers. After this step is complete, he'd then deliver the tickets to lottery dealers (authorized) and then proceed to collect his winnings and pay back the investors.

Now you may have noticed a step in there where Stefan would print out millions of tickets with different combinations. If you thought that sounded weird, you're actually correct. Well, at least by today's standards. While this method of playing the lottery was legal during Stefan's winning era, today, today it would not be. Instead, you are required to buy lottery tickets from the store. However, there are still parts of his strategy you can apply to up your chances of winning in 2024, as well as some others that weren't mentioned.

The first strategy you'll want to apply to win the lottery in 2024 is to pick a mixed amount of low and high numbers that are not close together in value. For example, if you're playing Mega Millions and are required to pick five numbers between 1 and 70, pick something like 1, 14, 37, 50, and 64. However, if this trick doesn't quite tickle your fancy, another one you could use is to avoid using a pattern when picking different numbers. For example, don't pick numbers that happen in succession like 1, 2, 3 or 14, 15, 16. Lotteries tend to pick winning numbers from a large pool, so picking a random pattern of numbers with no correlation is a good step.

Another somewhat obvious strategy you can apply is to pick the least common numbers that have been drawn throughout history for any given lottery. This can be done with a quick google search, or by checking out this article from CBS News Chicago. However, another strategy you can use that coincides with one undertaken by Stefan Mandel is to buy as many tickets as you possibly can. To do this, you can organize in your workplace, amongst your friends, or in any community of your choice so that you and a large group of people can pool your money together to make this more possible, similar to how Mandel managed to round up a group of investors.