There are as many strategies for buying a winning lottery ticket as there are players, but the odds remain the same across the board.

The South Carolina Education Lottery website lists the odds of a jackpot Powerball match at 1 in 195,249,054.00, based on a $1 play and rounded to two decimal places. Those odds stay the same whether the ticket is someone's lucky numbers or a computer generated quick pick, according to experts.

"There's no advantage to picking your own numbers over a quick pick, it's just an individual choice," said Stephanie Hemminghaus, South Carolina Education Lottery product relations coordinator. "Our Powerball jackpot winner we had last year, a 19-year-old from Gaston named Jonathan Vargas who won $35 million, said his method for choosing his numbers was using his siblings' ages."

This is not to say that winning is impossible, just highly unlikely. The unlikely does occur, however, as it did last week for Columbia's Solomon Jackson Jr.

Jackson bought a $1 Powerball ticket for the Aug. 19 drawing, added the PowerPlay option for a second dollar and ended up with the only ticket to match all six winning numbers in a $259.9 million jackpot. Jackson did not disclose his method for choosing his numbers.

"There's really no way to improve your chances of winning. Pick your favorite method of choosing a number, and it's as good as any other way," said Dr. Thomas Reid, a mathematics and statistics professor at USC Aiken.

Reid said that statistically speaking, it makes no difference whether a lottery player chooses the same number day after day or a new number each time.

"Each time you play, you have those same odds of winning. The more you play, the higher the chances you're going to win. But if you look at the expected value, you're losing money. In the long run, it does not pay to play the lottery; you end up losing more money than you get out of it on the average," he said.

In addition to attaching sentimental value to certain numbers such as birthdays and anniversaries, Reid said people also like to choose numbers that do not appear sequential: 1, 23, 34, 7 rather than 1, 2, 3, 4, for example. But, statistically, the numbers are as likely to come up in sequence as out of it.

He also said reinvesting small winnings from scratch-off games in the lottery does not affect the odds of success.

"That's what the casinos count on, that when you get money you're going to give it back to them," Reid said. "If you do that, you're going to spend more money than you win in the long run."

Said Hemminghaus, "We do encourage people, with Powerball as with all our games, to play responsibly. If you win $2, it's your choice to play again, but we do stress to play responsibly. We offer entertainment options, and education wins in the end."

Contact Suzanne Stone at sstone@aikenstandard.com.