[RKDinOKC]

I don't consider it winning if you by as many or more tickets than the prize money would pay for.

Someone could buy one of every possible number combination thereby reducing the odds to 1:1 and have purchased the winning numbers.

Chaos mathematics is the math of determining patterns in random events.
Finding a pattern in the numbers would reduce the odds.
Chaos theory does not find the actual numbers but can find the patterns to reduce the number of tickets purchased to hit the actual numbers.
You determine how close the previous numbers came to the next drawings winning numbers.
There is historical list all of the winning numbers and when they were drawn is available on-line.
By comparing the winning numbers you will see there are patterns in the randomness of how closely the numbers of a drawing are to the each number of the next drawing.
You can determine the spread plus or minus from a drawings numbers that will most likely hit at the next drawing.
You can also determine by how the numbers themselves are spread how likely the spread to hit the next drawing will be the smallest.
So from this you pick a spread and buy tickets that includes all the combinations withing that spread.

Example if your spread is plus or minus 1 and one of the numbers was 5 you would put 4, 5, and 6 in your combinations.
To cover all the combinations would have 5 numbers to the 3rd power or 125 tickets.

If the spread was plus or minus 3 that would be 7 possibilities for each number or 5 numbers to the 7th power, or 78,125 tickets.

To get a 90% chance of having a winning number no matter when you played you would have to buy plus or minus 7 numbers of the last winning numbers. To cover that spread would be 5 to the 15th power or 30,517,578,125 tickets.

You can see how advantageous it is to be able to find the patterns and frequency of have a close spread between the current numbers and the next drawings winning numbers.

I found I could regularly choose the correct time to have the winning numbers in my ticket set with a spread of plus or minus 4 numbers. That's 5 to the 9th power or 1,953,125 tickets at a cost of $3,906,250. Problem is the standard 5 ball payoff is $1,000,000 with a max of $2,000,000 with powerplay. Basically a loss of 50 to 75% invested.

And that does NOT include the powerball which has to be calculated separately becase its number comes out of a different set. Which would require you to increase the number of tickets purchased times the spread of the powerball to be able to hit the next powerball number along with the 5 balls. So, if I wanted to also hit the powerball and got the spread down to 20 numbers I would have to buy 39,062,500 tickets at a cost of $117,187,500 to hit the grand prize. The current grand prize is $64,000.000. About the same losses or worse percentage wise than just playing without the powerball at a greater overall expense. You could wait around until the jackpot got so big that the $118 million investment would pay off. But you also have to consider the taxes. And make sure you keep the stubs from all those 40 million tickets so you can deduct them from the taxes on the winnings.

Then there is also the logistics of being able to purchase that many tickets with specifying the numbers between one drawing and the next.

Wasn't that fun?

Next step would be to use the last 2 or 3 sets of winning numbers and see if the differences between the two previous numbers and the winning number can be trended to further reduce the spread and introduce a strange attractor to focus that spread. Example: if the previous 2 numbers were 10 and 8 maybe the strange attractor would be 9 and the total spread would only be 5 instead of a total spread of 9. That would be 3,125 tickets instead of 1,953,125 tickets. Greatly reducing the number of tickets required to get the same odds. Haven't done that yet to see what the results are. It does sound like a fun exercise.

See, told you I was a geek.