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If you've ever wondered what the odds of winning Powerball are, we can tell you right away that they're not very good. Statistically, you'd have much better chances of becoming president of the United States than winning the Powerball jackpot.

But what exactly are your chances of winning? Read on as we walk you through the numbers and statistics behind one of the biggest lotteries today.



What are the odds of winning the Powerball?

Your chances of winning the Powerball – if you were to play only one set of numbers, would be 1 in 292,201,338.

You can of course improve your odds of winning by purchasing more tickets and playing more combinations, but realistically speaking, it won’t make much of a difference.

No matter how you look at it, Powerball odds just aren’t very favorable. After all, in a game that features a $40 million minimum jackpot, it’d be unreasonable to expect otherwise.
Powerball Odds Math and Calculations

This section contains the math behind the Powerball odds we provided. We tried to keep our calculations as simple as possible, so you should be able to easily follow along. Ready for some statistics? Here we go.

For every Powerball drawing, 5 white balls are drawn, followed by a single red ball. These 6 balls represent the winning numbers for that draw.

First, let’s start by solving for the total number of possible combinations for the first 5 main (white) numbers.

There are 69 possible numbers in the pool for the first ball. For click aquí , there are only 68 possible numbers left. That’s because the same number can’t be drawn more than once. For the third, only 67 possible numbers remain – and then so on.

This gives us the following computation:

69*68*67*66*65 = 1,348,621,560 possible white ball combinations

But wait a minute, that doesn’t look right. That’s because the order of the numbers isn’t important to winning the game. You'd win if the numbers are drawn as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and also if they were drawn as 3, 2, 5, 4, 1.

So to account for this, you’ll need to include an extra step in the formula. The way to do this is to simply divide the number of possible combinations with the number of possible orders in which 5 numbers can be drawn, which can be computed similarly like this:

5*4*3*2*1 = 120 possible orders for a set of 5 numbers