Winning numbers in the second-largest Powerball jackpot ever will be drawn Monday night and there’s only one way to guarantee your ticket will be a match — if you’ve got the time and money to pull it off.Some players like to play “lucky” numbers while others like to spread their money around but to truly ensure a win you’d need to buy every possible combination. The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338 — that’s the number of possible combinations of white balls and the red Powerball. At the price of $2 per ticket, that means you could buy every possible combination for $584,402,676. That may be too costly to be a worthwhile investment. While the current jackpot is estimated at $1 billion if the winner takes the 30-year annuity, the cash option is $497.3 million. Professor Mark Glickman, a Harvard University statistician, suggested a similar approach could be profitable when the Mega Millions jackpot reached $1.2 billion over the summer. For either lottery game, anyone considering this method of guaranteeing a win would also need to consider how taxes cut into the windfall and the fact that more than one winning ticket could split the jackpot. There’s also the practical problem of how to fill out the bubbles for 292.2 million tickets, each with a different number. Even if you could complete each ticket in 30 seconds, that would take nearly 278 years for a single person to do without any breaks.
Winning numbers in the second-largest Powerball jackpot ever will be drawn Monday night and there’s only one way to guarantee your ticket will be a match — if you’ve got the time and money to pull it off.
Some players like to play “lucky” numbers while others like to spread their money around but to truly ensure a win you’d need to buy every possible combination.
The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338 — that’s the number of possible combinations of white balls and the red Powerball.
At the price of $2 per ticket, that means you could buy every possible combination for $584,402,676.
That may be too costly to be a worthwhile investment. While the current jackpot is estimated at $1 billion if the winner takes the 30-year annuity, the cash option is $497.3 million.
Professor Mark Glickman, a Harvard University statistician, suggested a similar approach could be profitable when the Mega Millions jackpot reached $1.2 billion over the summer.
For either lottery game, anyone considering this method of guaranteeing a win would also need to consider how taxes cut into the windfall and the fact that more than one winning ticket could split the jackpot.
There’s also the practical problem of how to fill out the bubbles for 292.2 million tickets, each with a different number. Even if you could complete each ticket in 30 seconds, that would take nearly 278 years for a single person to do without any breaks.