Keep it to yourself

Apart from deciding against playing in syndicates, there are several things that you can do to minimise the chances of your prize being shared if you do win the lottery. Most of these revolve around avoiding certain numbers or sets of numbers that other people are likely to pick. They are no more likely to come up, and if they do, you can bet that plenty of other people will have picked them as well. Some of these tips are as follows:

Check your ticket!!! An astounding number of winning tickets never get claimed for. In a few cases there have even been jackpot winners that have not come forward to claim their prize. If you are going to bother buying a ticket, make sure you actually check the results.

Minimise the numbers from 1 to 31. It’s no surprise that the most common numbers picked in lotteries around the world are the numbers ranging from 1 to 31. This is obviously because of birthdays. The numbers relating to both the day of the month and the month of the year fall between 1 and 31, meaning that these numbers are picked very regularly. Furthermore, because it is over 55 years since the last playable year number could be picked, only a proportion of older players will be able to pick a number that relates to the year of their birth.

Avoid lucky numbers. Many people pick 7 and multiples of 7 due to their belief that it is lucky. Similarly, enough people have read “Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” to ensure that a disproportionate number of people pick 42 as the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Don’t pick numbers that form a pattern. A lot of people pick numbers that forms pattern on the lottery ticket. There are only a certain number of patterns that can be formed with 6 numbers on a ticket, so it stands to reason that a portion of all pattern players will be picking the same patterns.

Don’t enter when there’s a big jackpot. While it may seem more appealing than ever to enter the lottery when there’s a big rollover jackpot, this is not really the case. Statistics show that the bigger the main prize, the more people will enter the lottery. This increase in the number of entrants outweighs the increase in prize money, meaning that your minute odds of success are actually even lower in these huge jackpot weeks.

Look at the odds and prize structures. There are an increasing number of different lottery games. The odds of winning are not the same for each one and the prizes you win are sometimes fixed and sometimes pooled. Where possible you should examine the game structure look at the relationship between the odds and each level of prize.

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