The foolproof way to win any lottery, according to maths

I have a completely infallible method of 100% guaranteed to win any lottery you like. If you follow my very simple method, you will absolutely win the maximum jackpot possible. There is just a tiny and tiny taken – you will already have to be a multimillionaire, or at least having a lot of rich friends.

Take the example of the US Powerball lottery. To play, you choose five different “white” numbers from 1 to 69, and a sixth “red” number from 1 to 26 – this last number can be a repetition of one of the whites. How many different lottery tickets are there? To calculate this, we must turn to a field of mathematics called combinatorial, which, as its name suggests, is a means of calculating the number of possible combinations of objects.

Choosing numbers in an unused set, as with a lottery, is an example of “n choose k“Problem, where n is the total number of objects from which we can choose (69 in the case of white powerball numbers) and k is the number of objects we want to choose in this set. Above all, as you cannot repeat the white numbers, these choices are made “without replacement” – because each winning numbered ball is selected for the lottery, it does not return to the swimming pool of the choices available.

Mathematicians have a practical formula to calculate the number of possible results n choose k issue: n! / (k! × (n – k)!). If you haven’t met him before, a “!” Mathematics “!” This does not mean that we are very excited – it is a symbol that represents the factorial of a number, which is simply the number you get when you multiply an whole, or whole number, by all those smaller than itself. For example, 3! = 3 × 2 × 1 = 6.

Connect 69 for n and 5 for kWe get a total of 11,238,513. It’s a lot of possible lottery tickets, but as we will see later, perhaps not enough. This is where the Red Powerball comes into play – it essentially means that you play both two lotteries and you have to win both for the greatest price. It makes much more difficult to win. If you have just added a sixth white ball, you would have a total of 119,877,472 possibilities. But because there are 26 possibilities for red balls, we multiply the combinations of white balls by 26 to obtain a total of 292 201 338 – much higher.

Ok, so we have just over 292 million possible powerball tickets. Now, here is the trick to always win – you just buy each ticket possible. Simple may not be quite the right word here, given the logistics involved, and above all, with tickets cost $ 2 each, you will have to have more than half a billion dollars in hand.

Is it enough to absolutely guarantee a big payment? This is a slightly delicate question to answer. The Jackpot Powerball takes place every week, it remains unmarried, which means that the quantity you can win varies. But there were only 15 examples of the jackpot increasing that the $ 584 million you need to buy each ticket, so most of the time, it is not worth it. The benefit by doing so is still decreased by the fact that the jackpots can be shared by several winners who choose the same figures, and that around 30% of the gains are taken in taxes.

In a way, none of this should be surprising – if there was a guaranteed way to win lotteries and make a profit, people would do it all the time and that the lottery runners would shine. But surprisingly, poorly designed lotteries arise – and experienced investors sweep to kill.

One of the first examples of this type of lottery bursting involved the writer and philosopher Voltaire. With Charles Marie de la Condamine, a mathematician, he trained a union to buy all the tickets in a lottery linked to French government debt. Exactly how he bypassed this is troubled and there is a suggestion of Skullduggery, as the fact of not having to pay the high price for the tickets, but the result is that the union seems to have won several times before the authorities closed the lottery in 1730. Writing later, in the third person, Voltaire said that “wrestles of victories were paid in cash and all the means of all groups. Entered association with many companies and has struck luck.

More modern lotteries have also suffered the same fate. A famous example is the Irish national lottery, which was bought by a union of ten people in 1992. At the time, players had to choose six numbers of 1 to 36, including our n choose k The formula indicates that 1,947,792 possible tickets produce us. With tickets costing 50 Irish Pence (the currency at the time), the conspirators raised the necessary £ 973,896 and began to buy tickets for a draw of 1.7 million pounds sterling.

The lottery organizers were windy of the program and began to limit the number of tickets that each supplier could sell, which means that the union has only managed to buy around 80% of tickets. In the end, he shared the jackpot with two other winners, which gave him a loss price of £ 568,682. Fortunately for the union, the lottery had also introduced a guaranteed price of £ 100 to match four numbers, which brought its total to £ 1,166,000.

The Irish national lottery quickly changed the rules to avoid a similar scheme, and nowadays, six numbers chosen from 47, increasing the number of tickets to 10,737,573. The jackpot is capped at 18.9 million euros, while the tickets are € 2 each, ensuring that the purchase of the lottery will never be profitable.

Despite the fact that the risks of a poorly designed lottery should now be understood, these incidents can still occur. An extraordinary potential example came in 2023, when a union won a jackpot of $ 95 million at the Texas State lottery. The Texas Lottery is 54 chooses 6, a total of 25,827,165 combinations, and the tickets cost $ 1 each, which makes it an interesting company-but the union may have had the help of the organizers of the lottery themselves. Although the repercussions of the scandal always take place, and we do not know if something illegal has happened, the European union, working through local retailers, may have acquired printing terminals of the organizers of the Lottery of Texas, which allows it to buy the necessary tickets and to smooth logistics. The Lottery Commissioner at the time denied being part of any illegal program. And no criminal accusation has been filed – the lawyer who represents the union who claimed the Jackpot, known as Rook TX, said: “All applicable laws, rules and regulations have been followed.”

So there you have it. Provided that you have a large sum of frank money and that you can find a lottery where the organizers have not made their reasonable diligence with the n choose k Formula, you can make a tidy profit. Good luck!