Mega Millions Lottery: The Best Way to Play

Part 2: Nine Top Mega Millions Strategies

Part 1 of this series described the traps and scams you face when playing the Mega Millions lottery. In the following you'll find the 9 top Mega Millions lottery strategies to use if you decide to play anyway.

Mega Millions lottery strategy #1: Only play when the jackpot is over $140,000,000

Your odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are vanishingly small so the payout has to be really high to be worth playing. If you hate math, you can take my word for it and skip to the next Mega Millions strategy. Otherwise, stay the course and finish reading this strategy first.

Professional statisticians use a term called "expectation value" for this. To calculate the expectation value of your Mega Millions lottery ticket purchase, multiply the value of each prize by its probability, and sum those values for all prizes. Then, subtract the probability of loss multiplied by the cost of a ticket

For the Mega Millions lottery, the total expectation value of all prizes except the jackpot is $0.18. Since the expectation value of losing is about $0.975 you need a jackpot higher than $140,000,000 to make the overall expectation value positive.

To make this mathematically accurate the Mega Millions jackpot needs to be 3 to 4 times higher to account for taxes and for the lump sum payment being much lower than the advertised annuitized jackpot. However, using strategies 5 and 8 below will offset those issues for the most part, so I'd stick with $140,000,000 as my minimal jackpot to make playing worthwhile.

Mega Millions lottery strategy #2: Concentrate your ticket purchases in higher jackpot drawings

Your odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are higher when you buy the same number of tickets in one drawing rather than spread over many drawings. As an extreme example, if you buy 88 million tickets in one drawing you'd have a 50% chance of winning the jackpot. Spread the same tickets over 88 million drawings and your chance of winning at least one Mega Millions jackpot is only 39%.