Powerball Jackpot Drawing for July 31, 2013 is $235 Million: Strategies to Win Big
The next Powerball Jackpot drawing will take place July 31st, and the prize at stake is over $235 million.
The Powerball jackpot has soared to $235 million after Wednesday's drawing turned up no winners. A New Jersey resident won over $1 million last week for matching five numbers, but missed out on the grand jackpot for failing to match the Powerball number. The current odds of winning the Powerball are 1 in 175,223,510.
In May, Gloria MacKenzie took home one of the biggest single-winner jackpots in history, worth over $5 million. It appears that MacKenzie's win was by chance, but some winners in the past have attempted to play the Powerball with more strategy. Three main strategies include tracking, wheeling, and pooling.
"Numbers that appear often in a certain game are called hot numbers. Some players will play these hot numbers exclusively on the assumption that since they have appeared often in the past, they should appear again in the future," TLC explained.
Making the strategy more complex, trackers also follow "cold numbers" or ones that haven't hit in a long time. The idea is similar to roulette, if a black number hasn't hit in five rounds it seems like a safe bet to throw money on black. Wheeling involves playing the same set of numbers from multiple tickets in different arrangements.
A more popular method however, is "pooling." The "pooling" method involves a number of people getting together to share the expense of tickets in order to buy more tickets. A Maryland woman and her McDonald co-workers attempted this method last year. After a winning ticket was announced, the woman lied about being the winner and refused to share her winnings, causing mass controversy. It was not until later that the actual winner turned up.
Despite such strategies and the many others that exist, some mathematicians say that such efforts are in vain.
"Some numbers do seem to definitely appear more than others comparing the standard deviation," Matthew Vea, an army reservist and programmer said. "However, that said, I do joke that if that kind of analysis truly did produce a winning result, I would be a millionaire by now. The fact that I have a day job shows there's no predicting the lottery."
