You can buy up to 13 weeks (26 drawings) in advance by asking for Advance Play.
You can add Megaplier (which can increase your winnings) for an extra $1. Mega Millions: Pay $2 and choose 5 from 70 numbers and 1 from 25 for the Megaball (or ask for a Quick Pick and the system will generate your numbers for you). Drawings are held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays at approximately 9pm. You can buy up to 13 weeks (39 drawings) in advance by asking for Advance Play. For an additional $1 per play, choose the Double Play option, and you will have a second chance to match your Powerball numbers in an additional drawing conducted immediately after the Powerball drawing. You can add Power Play (which can increase your winnings) for an extra $1. If the odds are 1 in 100,000,001 when you step in line, your odds remain 1 in 100,000,001 when you let someone else step in front of you.Powerball: Pay $2 and choose 5 from 69 numbers and 1 from 26 for the Powerball (or ask for a Quick Pick and the system will generate your numbers for you). There are no numbers ticked off a master list, leaving you with more limited possibilities. What's more, every number generated is independent of every number before it. In other words, there is no "risk of being nice." Stopping to sneeze before buying a Quick Pick ticket could just as easily cost someone a winning number as trading places in line. So every millisecond matters to a random number generator. Even the most basic computing machines have a built-in ability to create fairly random numbers, often utilizing their internal clocks to make them even more random. Random numbers are needed any time a programmer wants to surprise a user, such as in video games.
Computers are particularly good at generating random numbers, which have been important to computing since the very beginning. If either were true, your place in line certainly would matter.īut it’s not true.
Or maybe they could be generated 25 at a time in convenience stores, then handed out. Others let the lottery machine generate numbers, called "Quick Pick" in many states.Įven so, Quick Pick numbers could theoretically be generated in batches of, say, 10 million at time, by a central computer, and then doled out to local machines. Some lottery ticket buyers arrive with a pre-determined set of numbers in their heads - their children's birth dates, perhaps - and purchase tickets with those fixed numbers. (It shoulda been me!) But random acts of kindness are indeed safe, because random numbers don't work that way. (It coulda been me!) It would probably plunge you into full-fledged regret to learn the winner was right in front of you, had taken your place in line, and had purchased the same kind of Quick Pick machine-generated lottery ticket you did. It would feel strange - wistful, certainly - to learn that someone purchased the winning lottery ticket at your store. Could letting someone cut in line at the lottery counter hurt your odds of winning? To use the language of statistics, let’s call this the "risk of being nice." Before lottery ticket buyers start boxing out little old ladies at convenience stores everywhere, let's examine this issue from a mathematics point of view.