Whenever we play the lottery, we know that we have a low chance of ever hitting the jackpot. But that doesn’t put us off trying! After all, someone somewhere gets the win almost every time, and on the times that no-one wins, it just makes it all the sweeter for the person who wins the rollover prize the next time.

What you need to remember with the lottery is that the chances of winning are very slim so you have to do what you can to improve the odds of picking the right numbers. Remember just how far the odds are stacked against a win. With Powerball in the States, you have a 1 in 175 million chance of winning; with the Euromillions live draw on a Tuesday and Friday night, you have a 1 in 116,531,800 chance of winning.

The key to choosing lottery numbers is to remember that any number is as likely to be drawn as another, so the best you can do is aim to choose numbers that fewer people will choose. That way, should you happen to win, you wouldn’t have to share that jackpot prize with a lot of people.

Most people have favourite numbers that they like to use again and again. However, this isn’t the best way to improve your odds. There’s no greater chance of special birthday dates coming up, or your wife’s measurements either! You need to drop any sentimentality about numbers and use a more technical system.

Tracking – or frequency analysis – is one such system. This is where you monitor which numbers have come up regularly in a lottery draw so that you can see which numbers are ‘hot’. Some players believe that these numbers will continue to be hot so play them on the basis that they’ll be drawn again soon. However, other trackers take the opposite view and avoid the hot numbers as they think they’ve come up too many times. Instead, they pick the ‘cold’ numbers – those that haven’t been drawn in a while. Some people who have developed tracking systems that they believe in might play a mix of hot and cold numbers each time. However much effort you make to track numbers though, remember that the lottery operators aim to ensure that each draw is entirely random, so that would count against the odds of tracking being successful.

If you want to try tracking out for yourself, there are plenty of ways to find lists of previous winning numbers. Each lottery website will have a list of previous draws that you can use to plot the historical trends in a particular lottery. You’ll also find websites that offer tools for forecasting lottery draws based on the results that have already occurred.

If you put the effort into a tracking system for choosing your numbers, even if you don’t win, you’ll feel that you have done what you can to improve the chances you have of being a lotto winner aside from leaving it all to the hand of fate.