If I had a lottery ticket for every time I've heard "well I play the Mega Millions lottery because the jackpot is so much bigger"...

OK, in my head I'm thinking "but don't you know you have 10 times less chance of winning?"... I do try to be polite about it.

Fact is, lottery organisers love creating games with very long odds. Why? Because it means more rollover jackpots. Which means jackpots which grab newspaper headlines. Which generates more interest and higher ticket sales.

But what's more important -- the media profile of your chosen game? Or your odds of winning the lottery?

Here's a quick reminder of what lottery odds look like.

A standard 6 balls from 49 lottery gives you about a 1 in 13 million chance of winning for each ticket. Long odds yes, but hey this is a lottery! But just hang on a second...

A typical Power Ball type draw is normally 5 balls plus a bonus ball. That may sound easier to win, but it's actually so much harder it hurts! Take the U.S. Power Ball, that's 5 balls from 53 followed by 1 ball from 42 -- fact is your odds are now around 1 in 120 million for the jackpot. That means you have to buy TEN times as many tickets just to have the same chance of winning!

How about EuroMillions? It may at first sound harder to win, but it's actually easier! The Euro game is 5 from 50 plus 2 from 9. But that's actually a 1 in 76 million chance, almost twice as easy to win as the U.S. Power Ball.

The U.S. MegaMillions is far worse. 5 from 56, plus 1 from 46 -- that gives you astounding odds of 1 in 175 million!

There's also a smaller reason to be concerned at big rollovers. If a lot more people play there's a greater chance of multiple winners, which means sharing that enormous jackpot that was harder to win in the first place!

So are power ball type draws just designed to confuse players about lottery odds? Maybe -- but I'll leave that one for the conspiracy theorists. Let's just concentrate on improving your chances of winning the jackpot shall we!

Here's the short, sharp advice for playing more wisely...

Play the game which gives you the best chance of winning a life changing sum of money. Yes, 100 million does look great fun, but would it make your life any different to winning 10 million? Of course not. So why settle for 10 times less chance of actually winning!

So if you play a power ball type draw, the fastest, cheapest, most effective way you can boost your lottery chances right now... is to change the game you are playing.

Are you playing the right lottery?

Martin Waterhouse is a lottery and statistics fan - who is not popular with the vendors of expensive lottery systems based on dodgy maths and mumbo-jumbo! Publisher of the internets foremost lottery syndicate review and lottery tips site, Lottery-Syndicate-World...

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