Powerball Odds And You: 5 Bizarre Things More Likely To Happen


It’s understandable that you’re concerned about Powerball odds and the best way to increase your own. The odds certainly aren’t very good per ticket. According to the official Powerball website, each ticket’s winning chances are a measly one in 292,201,338.00.

I hate to break it to you, but even if you were rich enough to buy thousands of Powerball tickets (and if that’s true, why are you playing?), it would only budge your chance of winning by a minuscule amount. The odds of winning in the eyes of many analysts, experts, and even past winners is rather astronomical.

However, there are some pretty strange things that are more likely to happen to you in your lifetime than ever calling yourself a Powerball winner. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

The odds of being struck by lightning vary according to location and circumstance. The National Weather Service puts your odds of being hit by a lightning bolt during any given year at 1 in 960,000. When things are made more personal, those odds increase far more dramatically than you’d like. The chances of you being struck by lightning during a lifetime spanning 80 years? An incredible one in 12,000. When you put these odds next to your chances of buying a winning Powerball ticket, it’s clear that you have a better chance of succumbing to dozens of strikes before claiming a share of the Powerball jackpot.

If that weren’t enough, you even have a better chance of being struck by lightning while drowning than selecting the winning Powerball numbers.

The above image should be reassuring, right? The odds of a piano falling from above and crashing on you is just one in 250,000,000. Believe it or not, those odds are still better than winning the Powerball jackpot — by 42,00,000. It’s just shy of a 50/50 split! That means you could press one button and be worth $700 million and another button and be flattened like a pancake. The good news, if you feel like gambling under those circumstances, is there’s a two-third chance of survival should you “luck” into a falling piano.

Would you go for it?

You might remember there was quite a bit of hysteria this past hear concerning shark attacks. It seemed everywhere you looked, a shark was looking to take a bite out of a hapless swimmer. Well, National Geographic Television shared some useful statistics about sharks and your overall odds of being attacked and killed by one: one in 3,700,000. Again, way better than getting all of those winning Powerball numbers correct.

It’s important to note that the fear of sharks is more dangerous to these animals than they are to people. It’s estimated that a whopping 100 million of them are killed each year.

The odds of these bizarre things happening, while pretty high themselves, are still more likely to occur than winning the Powerball. So how about something strange that’s way way more likely to occur? Like, say, with a toilet.

How safe do you feel around a toilet? Because National Geographic shared some rather surprising information. The odds of suffering a serious injury due to a toilet in 2016 are an incredible one in 10,000. That means if 292,201,338 Powerball tickets are purchased by one person each, then 29,220 of those Powerball participants will have a funny story to tell — but odds are, no winning ticket to show for it.

One last odd thing that isn’t very painful, unless you happen to be the one giving birth: twins. Did you know that the odds of having twins are rather high? The BabyCenter shared that as of 2013, about three of every 100 births were twins. If you’re hoping for triplets, the odds are one in 837. Even as the odds multiply, you’ll note that they’re nowhere near as incredible as the luck needed to achieve a single winning Powerball ticket.

Crazy right?

While there are more unusual things in this world than winning the lottery — meeting a doppelganger or getting crapped on by a bird flying overhead, for instance — they seem to be few and far between.

[AP Photo/David Zalubowski; Upupa4me via Flickr | Cropped and Resized | CC BY-SA 2.0]

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