Winning millions of dollars at the lottery is, of course, a long shot, but there are ways you can mathematically improve your chances of winning a jackpot! Here are seven secrets revealed to winning the lottery.

1. Buy More Tickets. The more tickets you play, the better your chances of winning. It’s simple math. If you play three tickets, you are three times as likely to win as if you played just one ticket. Do you want to increase your chances tenfold? Then play ten tickets!

2. Form a Lottery Pool. The more tickets you play, the more it’s going to cost you to chase a million dollar prize. So you always have to keep in mind money management. You just can’t spend all your spare money, or your food and rent money chasing a dream that’s unlikely to happen. Let me state the obvious: Millions play, few win. But there’s a way around it. Form a lottery pool with your fellow workers, friends or family members.

Where before maybe you were limited to say five tickets, now your lottery pool of 20 players can work 100 tickets. If one of those 100 tickets win big, there is plenty of lottery winnings to go around. Money, money, money! Everyone will be happy! And of course, you’ve increased your chances of winning by 20 times!

Maybe you put together a pool of more players and more tickets and run a line of 500 tickets! Lots of winning possibilities there.

3. Wheel Your Numbers. If you were to play every one of you chosen or favorite numbers in every possible combination, it would cost you a fortune. That is not very practical, nor is it very sensible. If you choose six numbers in a 6-ball lottery, you buy just one ticket. But what if you want to play nine numbers, or ten, or, heaven forbid, even more numbers? The cost would be astronomical.

However, if you use a wheeling system, you get all your numbers in play at a reasonable cost. The idea of a wheeling system is to get good coverage of your chosen numbers in a system so that if they get drawn, you have an excellent chance of winning money without breaking the bank.

4. Play More Often. This is similar to item 1, “Buy More Tickets.” If you play more frequently, you’ll have more games in play and therefore a greater chance of hitting winning lottery tickets. For example, if you played every drawing, your odds would be greatly increased over just playing infrequently when the mood struck.

5. Choose Games with Better Odds. In other words, play lotteries with a smaller pool of numbers. The greater the pool of numbers in a lottery drawing, the more difficult it is to get the winning combination of numbers. For example, a 6/44 game gives you greater chances of winning than a 6/49 game and similarly, a 6/42 is even better. Even better than that would be a 5/42 game. If there is a 5/40 game offered, you’ve taken another step forward. There is a tradeoff though: The more difficult the game to win, the greater the prize and conversely, the “easier” the game to win, the lower the jackpot amount.

6. Pick Numbers Others Don’t Play. With all else equal, all numbers over the long run will get chosen about the same number of times. However, winning tickets are often shared among multiple players who have come up with the same tickets. So a million dollar prize split 5 ways would net each player $200,000. You’re not going to complain about winning $200,000 but wouldn’t it be much better to have won the entire $1 million?

That’s where strategic number picking comes into play. If you choose lesser-used numbers in your tickets, a winning ticket will pay more because you’re much less likely to share your jackpot! What are the lesser-used numbers? Numbers 32 and higher! Since many players choose birthdays, anniversaries, and other special dates to form their tickets, these numbers are played at a much greater rate.

Go the road easily travelled and you’ll get greater rewards if you hit.

7. Check Winning Results! There are many stories of winning prizes that go unclaimed, even multi-million dollar winnings! This is stating the obvious, but how often must we state the obvious in life anyway? If you’re going to play, see if you won. Don’t be one of those players that hits the life-changing numbers, but never checked and lost out. Let me repeat: make sure to check your tickets after every drawing.