While lottery players may buy tickets with numbers that are based on birthdays or significant dates, those numbers won’t increase their odds of winning. Instead, Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman recommends playing the Quick Picks lottery game to maximize your chance of winning.

The reason that many people play the lottery is that they’re convinced that if they win the jackpot, their lives will change dramatically for the better. While there are some truths to that belief, the majority of people who play the lottery are not affluent and they are disproportionately lower-income, less educated, and nonwhite. Their irrational gambling behavior is fueled by this sense that the lottery is their last or only hope of changing their circumstances.

Lottery officials try to convince the public that the lottery is a fun and harmless pastime, but they’re also trying to mask the regressivity of their games. They promote the idea that playing the lottery is a “recreational” activity that people can take lightly, but they’re hiding the fact that most of the money comes from a small group of committed gamblers who don’t take it lightly and spend large amounts of their incomes buying tickets.

State lotteries typically begin operations with a set number of relatively simple games, but they soon evolve into bigger and more complex enterprises that become dependent on revenues from a small group of gamblers. This obfuscates the reality that the lottery is an unsustainable enterprise and that it’s unlikely to ever be run in a way that’s beneficial for the public.