Can A Fortune Cookie Help You Win The Illinois Lottery?

A little help never hurts when you're trying to win some big money.

When the Powerball jackpot gets huge, I'll buy one ticket with random numbers. I sometimes end up with one matching number, but most of the time it's none. I'm never going to win big that way.

Is there a secret to winning?

Fivethirtyeight.com did some research on whether using the numbers in a fortune cookie would work.

Here's how they did it.

"Taking all the numbers from the fortunes and compared them to the Powerball numbers from Nov. 1, 1997, to May 27, 2017. Then calculate what the winnings would be if someone bought one Powerball ticket for every single one of the combinations." 

Here are the results for the fortune cookie numbers.

"You would make $4.4 million on $4.2 million in ticket purchases."

What about for the random numbers?

"You would earn $1.7 million in winnings on $4.2 million in ticket purchases."

It looks like using the numbers from a fortune cookie would do much better than the random picks.

Next time I order takeout from Happy Wok, I'm going to pay more attention to the numbers in my fortune cookie.

Video; Interview with Jeff Dunham