Michigan Lottery

There’s a lot of confusion out there when it comes to calculating the odds for winning in different lottery systems and games.  The problem is, there’s no on-shot way to figure out all the small variations in the games, but people still want to use the only system they know how, which is usually the “multiply the chance of guessing one number by the next, and the next”.  This works for basic systems, but not all.  Let’s take a look at a basic system.

Our baseline from the Michigan Lottery games will be the Michigan Lottery Daily 3.  A “straight” ticket means you have to pick three numbers, in order, and the pool of numbers continually replenishes itself.  By that, I mean that you could draw a “1″ three times in a row.  When you get into some of the bigger games that’s not always the case.

It’s pretty simple to figure out that our chance of drawing any one of the ten numbers on the first try is 1 in 10, or 10%.  Now, since order maters, to get two correct numbers we need to factor in our chances of drawing the first one correctly, which we already know to be 10%.  Since the chance of drawing the second number correctly is also 10%, all we need to do is multiply the two probabilities by each other to come up with our overall odds, 1 in 100 or 1%.

To continue down the line we simply continue to multiply.  We find our chance of picking the winning number is 1 in 1000.  Pretty good odds in the lottery world.

Let’s look at this another way, though.  If we play the Daily 3 with a ticket called a box 6-way, that essentially means we’ve picked three different numbers and can win if they are picked in any order.  So, a ticket with 1-2-3 will win if 1, 2, and 3 are drawn in any order.  The 6-way comes from the fact that there’s 6 different ways 3 numbers can combine to form a unique group.  If we had four unique numbers, they could combine in 24 different ways.

So the way we calculate order-irrelevant tickets is to find the number of different possible combinations for that set and divide the ordered probability.  For a Daily 3 where order doesn’t matter, that means we start with our probability of 1 in 1000, and divide it by 6, giving us a 1 in 133 chance.

We’ll delve into some more complicated systems in the next post.

First of all, there is absolutely no guaranteed way of winning the lottery, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We can, however, look at this from a statistics point of view and get a little perspective.

The Michigan Lottery Mega Millions is what’s known as a 5/56 + 1/46 lottery. The odds of picking the winning number in this system are about 1 in 176 million, or in other words, you’re more likely to be stuck by lightning twice in one day. But by understanding the probabilities and statistics behind the Michigan lottery odds, you can significantly increase your chances.

A Basic Lottery System

Let’s start by trying to simplify things a bit. If you were to buy 11 tickets, you could make sure that you have every number, 1 through 56, on one if your tickets. Leaving the mega ball out of the equation, you would without a doubt have at least one ticket with one winning number on it. Guaranteed. This would cost you 11 dollars – an amount that some people play on a weekly basis anyway. In this scenario, you only have to match 4 other lottery balls and the mega ball. Your odds of winning the Michigan Lottery Mega Millions increase drastically to 1 in 16,895,340. This represents over a 10x increase of your likelihood to win. That’s a huge increase in probability. Granted, you’re still in the neighborhood of a single lightning strike, but you’re getting closer. Let’s take it a little further, though.

Based on statistical studies, the most probable outcome for a Michigan Lottery drawing is three odd numbers and three even numbers. In other words, when everything is said and done, 33% of the time there are three even numbered balls and three odd numbered balls on the tray. Also a lottery result with all non-consecutive numbers occurs just once every other week on average, and you can further increase the Michigan lottery odds by picking tickets with three high and three low number selections. This is also another common denominator in winning numbers over the years.

Finally, one of the biggest advantages you can give yourself is to know what the numbers were for the previous two weeks. The most probable combination will have no lottery numbers from the previous week, and no two numbers from the week before that. This immediately narrows your choices down and gives you some constraints within which to operate. While the odds are still astronomical, they’re not quite as bad as they were to start out with. Apply these tips, and your chance of winning the Michigan Lottery will be higher than ever.