Despite the fact that you can buy lottery tickets for virtually nothing, winning the jackpot is still an extremely unlikely event. However, if you are willing to make some minor adjustments to how you look at the lottery, you can make a more informed decision about whether or not it is a good deal for you.

If you think of the lottery as a form of entertainment, rather than an investment, it makes more sense to buy a ticket or two. You may even find yourself winning a prize! However, if you view the lottery as an investment, you should think twice before making a purchase.

Lottery companies know this, which is why they often publish lists of lucky stores or regions. These stories are designed to give bored newspaper journalists something to write about, but they don’t claim that buying tickets in those areas improves your chances of winning.

The best way to decide whether or not to buy a lottery ticket is to calculate its probability of winning. There are several different methods to do this, but one of the simplest is to multiply the odds of winning by the value of the ticket. For example, if the chance of winning the Powerball is 1 in 292 million, then the ticket costs $2.00. You should then compare that cost to the entertainment value of the ticket and make a decision based on that information. Cianna Garrison is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Elite Daily, How-To Geek, Review Geek and Truity. She received her bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University in 2018.