mega millions winners who bought tickets online

That's a different approach, and it's just like any other gambling: You should only be willing to spend what you can afford to lose.' 'That said, it can be fun to play the lottery and imagine you win. 'My advice is don't play the lottery and expect to win,' Lefton added.

In other words, investing more money in a higher number of tickets might not always be worth the expense, Lefton previously told CNBC Make It. Lew Lefton, a faculty member at Georgia Tech's School of Mathematics. Buying five tickets would give you a five in 302 million chance of winning the current $405 million Mega Millions jackpot, which are better odds than just buying one ticket, but you're still far more likely to be struck by lightning.Īlso, buying more tickets means that 'the investment you make by playing multiple games also goes up and the payouts in a real lottery may vary,' according to Dr. That also means that regularly buying lottery tickets - whether it's every day or every week - does not improve your odds of winning, because the odds of all lotteries are independent.Īnd even buying a few extra for a particular drawing doesn't improve your chances all that much, especially when the odds are roughly 300 million to one (as is the case with the current huge Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots). 'In other words, having previously won the lottery does not improve or make less likely the chance of winning the lottery in the future.'

'If someone already wins the lottery, then the chance that the person wins the lottery a second time will be exactly the same as the probability they win the lottery if they had not previously won the lottery before,' Glickman said. (Just ask multiple winners like Peggy Dodson, who in 2019 won a $1 million jackpot with a 'Max-a-Million' scratch-off lottery ticket from the same Pennsylvania convenience store where she had purchased another scratch-off ticket that was a $100,000 winner only two years earlier.) In fact, even if you've won the lottery once before, you still have the same odds of winning the next drawing as anyone else who buys a ticket. Whether you play the lottery every day, or you're buying your first-ever lottery ticket on a lark, the odds of winning any individual drawing or scratch-off ticket remain the same.

That's because the odds of winning any given lottery remain the same despite the numbers selected or even if you buy a ticket for every drawing.

Mega millions winners who bought tickets online