Lottery Odds Calculator

In short Choosing 6 numbers from 49 gives 13,983,816 possible combinations, so the jackpot odds are 1 in 13,983,816. The count is C(49,6) — the number of ways to choose 6 things from 49 when the order does not matter — and every one of those combinations is exactly as likely as any other. That includes 1-2-3-4-5-6. Picking numbers that "look random" does not improve your chance of winning at all; it only changes how many people you would share a prize with, since consecutive runs and date-shaped picks are chosen by a great many players. Buying more tickets helps exactly in proportion and no more: ten tickets make it 1 in 1,398,382, which is still a number nobody can act on. At two draws a week with one ticket each, you would expect a jackpot roughly once every 134,460 years. Partial matches are a different calculation, and they use the same hypergeometric distribution the card page runs on — matching 3 of 6 from 49 is about 1 in 57, which is why smaller prizes feel achievable while the top one never arrives. One thing this page does not answer: whether a ticket is worth buying. That depends on the prize and how many others play, and it is the expected-value calculator's question, not this one's.