Not really?
The odds of winning are the same regardless, because you need to match every number to get a jackpot. Really, there is just an increased chance of splitting a jackpot with another person when the prize gets really large, since more tickets are generally sold. But I imagine EV of a lottery ticket with a $1B jackpot is still higher than the same lottery ticket when the jackpot is $100M.
There are also bad number choices and good number choices. 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point!
To a lesser degree, choosing numbers under 31, or under 12, will put you in a collision space with other players who like to choose birthdays.
Just use the random pick and don’t think about it. If you do win the jackpot, you have higher odds of being the only one.
Uh... so at first I saw your point, but if your odds of winning never actually change, how is not winning better than splitting a jackpot?
But if you play the lottery week after week, year after year—and you always play the same numbers—then you’re ensuring a mediocre prize should you actually get the jackpot.
Playing the lottery is not a mathematically sound decision in any case, but there’s no reason to make it even worse by chopping your potential jackpot winnings down by over 99%
The BC 6/49 lottery (6 balls 1-49, one bonus ball) for example has 53% of the common "prize pool" split amongst all 4-ball matchers, so if you're not hitting the jackpot you get less cash out of a high-demand drawing.
And given the prize pool is something like 18% of net receipts... yeah EV is still well in the negatives.
> Not really?
A big jackpot draws more players, and that reduces the payouts at the intermediate levels.
Which has nothing to do with your chance of winning.