Whenever the pot gets high, I play the same number 3 times. Rarely do more than three or four different people win. This way, you get a vast majority of any jackpot.
If you are inclined to play multiple tickets, your odds are not going to be improved significantly. Playing the same numbers three times significantly increases your share if you win.
“Colorado man” smarter than “Florida man.”
I think this is the wrong approach to playing the lottery. What I'd rather do is increase my odds of winning $100,000 to $2 million. I wouldn't even know what to do with $300 million, but a smaller jackpot would be a great financial cushion that wouldn't change my lifestyle very much.
Though the effects — bias, insufficient stirring, etc — were there they weren’t enough to get one wheel I constructed for the Texas Lottery to “win” more than 1 dollar for every 6 spent (had I bought the tickets, iirc it would have been $45 a play). The problem is, succinctly, that if you have enough numbers to get bias to really work for you a triplet wheel too easily absorbs them into unproductive combinations while a doublet wheel quickly becomes far too expensive. Insufficient stirring or avoiding extremes of combined number value helps a little but not enough ... even then it’s just luck is choosing what numbers form any given triplet (or doublet).
I would point out that the 5+1 powerball prevents such wheel tactics as triplets or doublets ... though the powerball itself disproportionately seems to fall in the 60s the only time I checked.
Lotteries are taxes on people who don’t understand math. If you do understand math you can go broke a tiny bit less slowly though.
So, you hold about half of the winning tickets and get the 'vast majority' of the pot? Nice work if you can get it.
On odds of winning. Let's simplify it so your limited mental horsepower gives you a chance to keep up. Suppose you were the only entrant in a one digit lottery with four possible numbers. If you buy one ticket, what are your odds of winning? 1 in 4.
If you buy two tickets? 1 in 2. (If you select two unique numbers)
That's not a significant increase in odds of winning? Anyone who has ever walked into a statistics class learns the basics of how independent events work. You clearly don't grasp the concept.