Powerball jackpot hits $1B: Expert talks best practices when choosing lottery numbers
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- There are just a few more hours until the $1 billion Powerball drawing.
This is only the seventh time a jackpot in the United States has reached at least $1 billion.
The lump sum payout is $518 million, if you'd prefer to collect your winnings all at once.
We spoke to a lottery expert about some strategies when it comes to choosing numbers.
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"You kind of want to use the entire play slip and spread your numbers out," said Jared James, founder of Lottoedge.com. "We also found, which is kind of interesting, a pretty significant amount of the time we found that the perfect mix is about three even and two odd or three odd and two even. So, really kind of a good balance of even and odd numbers. And that came out about 64% of the time we saw that kind of mix come out on both Powerball and Mega Millions."
The odds of hitting the jackpot are about 1:292 million.
You are more likely to get struck by lightning at some point in your life -- those are odds are about 1:15,000.
Watch the full interview in the player above.
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