The large Powerball jackpot has brought out the “experts” offering advice on how to increase your chances of winning. Unfortunately, many of these experts don’t seem to have taken Statistics 101. Lotteries are random. The only way to increase your chances of winning is to buy more tickets.

Here are some of the common misnomers that I’ve read.

• You have a better chance of winning if you purchase a computer generated ticket – It’s true that computer generated tickets win about 70-80% of the time.  However, that’s simply because 70-80% of tickets purchased are computer generated.  Think of it this way, if 70-80% of the people who buy tickets are women, you’d expect 70-80% of the winners to be a woman. The person’s gender isn’t increasing their chances of winning nor is the method of picking numbers.

• Check past drawings to determine which numbers are “overdue” – Lottery drawings are independent events.  That means that each time the event occurs, it is unaffected by what happened previously. Therefore, even if the number 7 came up in the last ten drawings but the number 45 hasn’t come up in the last twenty, the two numbers have the exact same probability of being pulled. This is a tough one for some people because it seems to go against our intuition.  After all if a number hasn’t come up in a few weeks, shouldn’t it be “due”?  Think of it practically. If you roll a die there is a one in six chance of a specific number coming up.  If you roll the die again, that number still has a one in six chance of coming up.  It has a one in six chance every time the die is rolled.  The previous rolls don’t influence the subsequent roll.  That same is true in lottery drawings.

• Spreading your numbers out will give you a better chance of winning – Some articles suggest avoiding using birthdays because they will constrain you to numbers under 12 (month) and 31 (day).  The spread of the numbers doesn’t matter.  Because each number is pulled randomly (see above), every group of numbers has the same odds of winning as any other sequence.  Therefore, 1,2,3,4,5 has the same chances of being wining as 1,17, 35, 37, 54.

Our brains have a hard time understanding chance.  Instead, we tend to rely on our experiences, memories, and “common sense”.  Unfortunately, all three of those things are subject to the natural fallibilities that our brains have in processing information.  The stakes are pretty low when it comes to the lottery.  Worse case – you have some fun and lose a few bucks.  However, when we make these mistakes in business the results can be disastrous.  Don’t trust your experience when it comes to playing the odds or you just might become another statistic.