Lottery odds with multiple tickets
Buying more tickets raises your chance, but by much less than most people hope. Enter the number of tickets and see your exact jackpot odds, what it costs and how many tickets a real chance would take.
Chance of the jackpot
1 in 29,220,134
with 10 tickets
Cost
$20.00
$2 each
Odds improvement
10x
in proportion, but so is the cost
How many tickets would you need?
With 292,201,338 possible tickets, buying more tickets raises your chance only in proportion. Ten tickets give you ten times the chance of one, which is still tiny. No number of tickets is a plan, and the more you buy, the more you can lose.
The simple rule
If every ticket is different, your chance is the number of tickets divided by the total number of possible tickets. Ten different Powerball tickets give you 10 in 292,201,338, which is 1 in 29.2 million. You have made your chance ten times better, but ten times a very small number is still very small.
Quick picks are random and can repeat, so the chance is a hair lower than with ten tickets chosen to be all different. For small numbers of tickets the difference is invisible.
Why you cannot buy your way to a likely win
To have a 1% chance at the Powerball jackpot you would need about 2.9 million different tickets, which costs about $5.8 million. To have a 50% chance you would need about 146 million tickets, or $292 million, to win a jackpot that is often worth less than that after tax. This is why expected value matters more than any ticket strategy.
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Frequently asked questions
How many tickets do I need to guarantee a win?
One of every possible combination: 292,201,338 tickets for Powerball. At $2 each that is over $584 million, more than the usual jackpot.
Do two tickets double my odds?
Yes, if the numbers are different. Your chance goes from 1 in 292 million to 2 in 292 million.
Is it worth buying more tickets?
It raises your chance and your expected loss in the same proportion. It does not improve your odds per dollar.
Do office pools help?
A pool buys more tickets together and splits any prize. The group has better odds, each member's share of the prize is smaller, and the expected value per dollar is unchanged.