Why don’t psychics win the lottery?

By far one of the most common questions from people who are skeptical about the existence of psychic powers is the simple question: why don’t more psychics use their powers to win the lottery?

After all, money is always a good motivator, isn’t it? Fair enough…let’s consider the lottery as a fair test of psychic skills.

The odds of winning the lottery are dependant on a lot of things, but what people are most after is the jackpot. I used this tool to determine that the chance of winning my state lottery’s jackpot was 1 in 8,259,888 (65 balls, you have to choose 5 correct for the jackpot). Now, for a normal person who picks just regular everyday numbers, this is a very low chance.

However, lets say for the sake of argument, that you’re a psychic who knows that two particular numbers are going to come up in tonight’s lottery. So calculating those odds, you now have 63 balls, and you need to pick three correctly. The odds for that are 1 in 39,700. Still not very good, and you already knew 2/5^ths of the numbers that were going to come up!

Maybe you’ve got a really strong intuition that you know about 3 of the numbers which would appear in tonight’s lottery. In this case, there is a one in 1,891 chance that you’ll win. It’s still not very good, but it might be worth playing.

But all in all, is there still a good, solid chance, that even knowing 3 of the numbers that will come up in the lottery that you’ll win? Not really.

And we’ve assumed that the psychic is correct in their prediction. We’re all human aren’t we?

What people don’t understand about psychic powers is that there is rarely a solid, 100% answer to any question. You get impressions, you feel certain about some things, but you can never be 100% certain about something until it happens. Yes, I would venture to say that you should never bet the bankroll on your predictions, even that super-strong prediction you had just the other day.

It’s always healthy to have a little skepticism, even when we’re promoting the idea that psychic powers exist within everyone.

The advantage to developing psychic powers is to get a solid base of intuition. Learn to trust yourself, and in particular, learn to trust your emotions about things which you shouldn’t have a right to know.

Yes, I do believe that you can receive messages from “out there” and that communicating with spirits and using your connections to your soul energy can provide you some answers to life’s toughest questions. Learning to trust and interpret these signs is an incredible ability which we can all develop.

But going back to the main question, is it fair to use a randomized system like the lottery as a way to test psychic skills? No. Even if you are able to correctly predict 60% of the numbers, you will still have almost no chance of doing well on a psychic skills test like this.