For many people, winning the lottery is the ultimate dream. But obviously your chances of winning it big are extremely slim. In the United States the biggest lottery around would be the Powerball and its total jackpot is often in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The largest amount ever won by a single contestant was $590,500,000 dollars. If you win that much, or really any Powerball, you are pretty much set for life. But is there anyway to guarantee a win? Theoretically, yes there is.
The Powerball is decided via two separate systems of tumblers. The first five numbers are selected from 59 floating balls, and then the last number comes from a different tumbler that contains 35 floating balls. Your chances of winning are obviously pretty slim. However theoretically speaking, to guarantee a win you would need to buy 175,223,510 tickets in total, as that is the number of all the possible outcomes. In total that would cost you around $350 million dollars spent on lottery tickets.
While it sounds cool to guarantee a Powerball win, it is obviously not practical. First, not many people have that kind of money to spend on tickets obviously. Even if you did, the time constraint would be to difficult to work with. The Powerball entries are only taken between Wednesday and Saturday, until they reset. If it took one second to print a ticket, it would take around five and a half years to print out ever possible combination of numbers that would guarantee a win, but it would obviously be way to late. You could split up the purchasers to fit the time constraints, but you’d need around 565 people to purchase more than $620,000 dollars worth of tickets. Even if you do that, you’d still have to account for the taxes that are taken out of the winnings. So theoretically speaking it is possible to guarantee a Powerball win, but it’s going to be extremely challenging and difficult to do so.
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