Think you have a better chance of winning a lotto jackpot by always playing the same numbers, picking your “lucky” numbers or joining your office lotto pool?
CTVNews.ca spoke with experts to find out whether any strategies may actually give you a better shot.
Odds of winning
Lotto 6/49 and Daily Grand have similar probabilities of winning the top prizes, with a one-in-14 million chance of winning for Lotto 6/49 and about a one-in-13-million for the Daily Grand, Michael Wallace, associate professor in the department of statistics and natural science at the University of Waterloo, said in a recent video interview with CTVNews.ca.
Wallace said one way to think about it is if someone were to pick three people at random from the entire population of Canada.
“Your chances of winning the lottery, one of those top prizes, is roughly the same [as] you being one of those three people picked from the entire country,” he said.
Regardless of which numbers, games or strategies you choose, Wallace suggests that it may be best not to have such high hopes.
“When it comes to these lotteries, your chances of winning those really big prizes are so small that it’s probably not really going to make much of a difference in terms of your decision making,” Wallace said. “I would always say, if you’re going to play a lottery like this, play it for fun. Don’t play it expecting to win one of those really big prizes. You might, but it’s very, very unlikely.”
Office pools
Workers who join office lotto pools will have a higher chance of winning any prize because they’re buying more tickets, but there’s a caveat, Wallace said.
“Now the flip side to that, of course, is that you are pooling your resources, so you’re going to be sharing that prize at the end of it,” he said. “Ultimately, your chances of winning a prize do increase, but the prize you win will consequently be smaller as a result.”
Investing more in playing will increase your chances of winning while also increasing your cost, he added.
Jackpots can be good on the one hand since the prize is bigger, Wallace said, but that means more people will play, so the chances of sharing that jackpot with someone else increase.
Increasing your odds
While people who play the lotto may dream of retiring early, wiping out debt and living in swoon-worthy mansions, a statistician and regional lotto groups are tempering expectations.
“There’s nothing you can do to increase your specific probability of winning, besides just buying more tickets,” Wallace said. “The only strategy you can employ is choosing lotteries where you can choose your own numbers, choose numbers that other people are less likely to select, and then hope you get incredibly lucky, win that jackpot, and you’re not sharing it with someone else.
Tony Bitonti of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG), the government agency responsible for lottery games and gaming facilities in Ontario, agrees.
Playing the lottery is a “very random process,” with numbers generated randomly for draws, so there are no clear strategies to win, the spokesperson said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca in Toronto.
“Every number has an equal chance of being drawn, whether you pick it yourself or a computer randomly picks it for you,” British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) spokesperson Shelley Wong wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca.
Wallace says the lotto’s computer-generated winning numbers are “as close to random as we can generally get.”
“When it comes to a lottery, you will not be able to find a way to get an advantage by predicting the numbers,” he said.
Insights and patterns
While some believe there are no clear strategies to win, experts have observed patterns.
Since certain numbers are more likely to be chosen than others, selecting unpopular numbers means you are less likely to share a big prize if you win, Wallace said.
Wallace said a February 2023 study published in Significance, a general audience statistics magazine, looked at lottery numbers that are played across the world, including Canada. It found that lotto players like to pick birthdays, making the numbers one to 31 popular, while seven is also a common choice.
But the research doesn’t show which combinations of numbers to avoid or choose, he said.
“What that means is that the main strategy you can employ is to try and pick numbers that people are less likely to choose,” he said. “So that would be numbers above 31, for example, dates that aren’t going to be people’s birthdays, things like that.”
People like to choose anniversaries and the ages of their children as well, the OLG’s Bitonti said.
Bitonti said there’s no data showing who is more likely to win if you select “Quick Pick,” the option for auto-generated numbers, or your own numbers, but he noticed a few patterns.
“When we look at all of the numbers that are drawn over the year, surprisingly, every number comes up about 1.5 or two per cent of the time,” he said. “So there is not one specific number that keeps coming up when the draws happen.”
Popular Lotto 6/49 numbers chosen by players are 7, 14, 21, 28, 35 and 42, for instance, he said. The combination 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 for Lotto Max is chosen about 45,000 times a year, he added.
“If those numbers ever came up when the draw happens, then you’ll be sharing that with 45,000 other people out there as well too,” he said.
Picking certain numbers and playing them over and over also doesn’t work, Wallace added.
Wallace makes an observation based on the data from the Significance study.
For Lotto Max that costs $5 a ticket for three entries, it allows players either to pick one set of numbers themselves and get two computer-generated “Quick Pick” sets, or they can choose three “Quick Pick” sets.
“In fact, in that lottery, you as a player don’t have much opportunity to choose the numbers yourself,” Wallace said. “And what this leads to is, we see in the data a result where for that particular lottery, there’s a lot less of a pattern in the numbers people play.”
Consequently, Wallace said the probability of sharing the prize for particularly popular number combinations will decrease because of the computer-generated numbers for Lotto Max.
“But then it will increase the probability of sharing the prize for number combinations that people might be less likely to choose,” Wallace said.
If you want to increase your chances of not having to share a prize if you won, Lotto Max wouldn’t be a good game to play because you wouldn’t get to choose the numbers for the second and third picks, Wallace said.
“So if you want to try and apply that strategy of picking numbers that other people don’t pick, you want to choose a lottery where you get to choose every entry yourself,” Wallace said.
Quick Pick vs. player selection
Most players in the Western region choose the Quick Pick feature of computer-generated numbers “for its simplicity and ease,” according to Emily Olsen, spokesperson for the Western Canada Lottery Corporation (WCLC), in an email to CTVNews.ca.
“We do see player-selected winners as well, but because of the large number of people playing Quick Pick, it’s statistically more frequent that we see Quick Pick winners on games,” Olsen wrote.
WCLC is a non-profit that runs lottery and gaming activities in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
BCLC, a Crown corporation that manages gambling in the province, also says Quick Pick is the most popular option for players instead of choosing their own numbers for the same reason.
Individual numbers show up in winning selections equally over time, Olsen added. “We really don’t see any number being drawn more or less than others in the winning selections,” she said.
Gambling addiction
It’s important for players to understand how the lottery works and be realistic about their chances of winning, Wallace said.
“I think for most players, they play with a reasonable understanding that they’re probably not going to win that life-changing sum of money, but it’s fun to buy a ticket and at least dream for a few days.”
Playing the lotto can become a problem if you are negatively affected by losing and if you can’t afford it, he said.
Bitonti said lotteries are a form of entertainment and the OLG takes responsible gambling very seriously.
“We always say you only need one ticket to win,” he said.
Responsible Gambling Council of Canada and OLG’s PlaySmart program on its website and in casinos offer resources for help with addiction.
