How to boost chances of winning the new £1,000,000,000 Powerball lottery – don’t use your birthday
The National Lottery will soon give players two chances to win a new mega jackpot game.
It will see UK players pay £4 per line to compete with their US counterparts to win the shared jackpot of over £1 billion, which will be paid out over 30 years to UK winners.
Allwyn reached an agreement with the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL) in the US to bring Powerball to the UK, although an exact launch date is yet to be set.
The odds of winning the game depend on the number of Powerball tickets bought, but are usually around one in up to 11.7 million.
Players need to match five numbers and the Powerball number to rake in the riches, whether they play in the US or the UK.
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Can you boost your odds of winning?
Most players play using numbers that have meaning to them, whether that’s birthdays, anniversaries, lucky numbers or others.
Others choose numbers that haven’t been drawn in a while, but doing so doesn’t necessarily increase your odds of winning.
They may also think that a number that hasn’t been drawn in a while will be drawn soon.
Dr Ben Parker, lecturer in statistics at Brunel University, told the Daily Mail: ‘People think they see patterns, but the lottery is sufficiently random that you can’t do that.’
Dr Parker said that numbers chosen because of a birthday tend to be lower, but choosing some higher numbers might help as well.
‘You need to make sure that if you win, nobody else has your numbers,’ he said.
‘Pick high numbers, get your dog to choose them from ping pong balls or use the last two digits of 6 friends’ phone numbers. It will get you more money on average.’
The best way to boost your chances of winning is to buy multiple tickets with different combinations of numbers.
What are the lottery’s new changes?
The National Lottery will soon also allow players two chances to win, which will mark the biggest overhaul to the National Lottery’s draw-based game Lotto since 1994.
The change will be rolled out from June 7 and is expected to more than double the number of Lotto millionaires – from around 140 a year to about 345.
The first two-round draw will take place on Wednesday, June 10, with Lotto draws continuing to take place at around 8 pm every Saturday and Wednesday.
The lottery firm also recently completed a £450 million major tech upgrade, which involved moving 18 million player records and more than three billion historical transactions from old platforms to new ones, and transforming the technology used by retail partners.
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