THE lottery’s nine-figure jackpot is still up for grabs as of this writing, and has ballooned to a whopping P695 million. For weeks, the massive purse has been making a lot of people rich with hopes and dreams.
“Resign from work within the day of claiming the prize and see the world,” answered one friend during a recent group daydreaming session on how we each plan to spend the money. “Pay off debts, give to charity, disappear from everyone,” shared another, laughing.
Personally, I have yet to make enough fortune to become immune from the lottery’s temptations, and so this past weekend, in the middle of the night and under pouring rain, I went to purchase my first-ever ticket and ticked the six digits that I thought would completely change my life forever.
But I lost, of course.
What I picked up in defeat, however, was the interest in—not addiction to—what it takes to win. Is it really even possible to win?
Taking my curiosity to the Internet brought me to a 2016 Forbes.com article, titled “It’s Math: Why You Should Never Play the Lottery.” On it was an interesting opening argument presented by Richard Lustig, seven-time winner of lottery jackpots and author of Learn How to Increase Your Chances of Winning the Lottery.
“Like everybody else, I was losing all the time,” Lustig told Forbes.com. After the failures, he said a realization hit him, that there had to be a way to increase one’s success rate of nailing this one-in-a-million game of chance. Finally, he came up with a formula through trial and error, select points of which are listed below:
Set a ‘lottery budget’
“Do not get caught up in what’s called lottery fever. Don’t spend grocery money. Don’t spend rent money. Figure out what you can afford to spend. Don’t worry about how much Joe Blow down the street is spending…. Figure out what your budget is, what you can comfortably afford to spend, and stay within that budget.”
Spread the numbers
“If you pick your own numbers and only play birthdays and anniversaries, you’re splitting the pot with 20 to 40 people. If you spread the numbers out across the whole track, you’ll either be the only winner or will split it with only one or two people.”
Play the same numbers every week
Play consistently
Lustig’s previous wins may give weight to his words, but not everyone buys in. Fraud examiner Tracy Coenen dismissed Lustig’s much-publicized lottery tips as part of the media tour to promote his book—which Coenen called, “more accurately, a pamphlet”—saying the tips were a “fraud.”
“Playing the lottery is just like playing roulette: there is no skill involved,” Coenen wrote on the web site of her company, Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting. “The lottery is completely random, and the likelihood that one set of numbers will be picked is exactly the same as any other set of numbers. It does not matter if a set of numbers has already won, because the lottery has no memory.”
Coenen insisted that the lottery is a game that has to do more with chances than certainty. So what really is the numbers game behind this numbers game?
As it turns out, here in the country, the odds of winning the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office’s 6/58 Ultra Lotto game and its P695-million jackpot would make Larry Graham and his hit song shake.
Computation from webmath.com showed that the chances of a person successfully predicting the six digits to be drawn from a field that includes the numbers from 1 to 58 is 1 in 40, 475,358. Again, but this time read it slower, number per number: 1 in 40, 475, 358.
The site is gracious enough to contextualize what seems to be a random amalgam of a figure. It states that, for perspective, the chances of a person being hit by lightning is 1 in 2,000,000. Meanwhile, a pregnant woman giving birth to quadruplets stands at 1 in 705,000, and a person finding a pearl inside the oyster he or she is eating is 1 in 12,000.
All that tells me is a person is likelier to become the oyster maniac female version of Flash with four children who look alike than he or she is to win the lottery.
Even then, not a few people certainly have, and will go, Han Solo and try to buck the odds, over and over again.