Does picking your own numbers instead of Quick Pick matter?
For your odds of winning: no difference at all. Whether a combination was chosen by you or generated randomly by a Quick Pick machine, it's still just one combination out of the same fixed pool, with exactly the same probability as every other one. The lottery machine that draws the winning numbers has no way of knowing — or caring — how a ticket's numbers were chosen.
Where it can matter is payout size, if you happen to win. Research on real ticket sales consistently shows that self-picked numbers cluster heavily: birthdays and anniversaries push huge overrepresentation into the 1–31 range, and certain numbers get picked disproportionately for being culturally "lucky." Quick Pick, by contrast, draws uniformly across the entire pool with no human bias baked in. So if a heavily self-picked combination wins, it's statistically more likely to be shared with other winners who leaned on similar patterns — while a Quick Pick line is less likely to collide with anyone else's reasoning, purely because it was never reasoned in the first place.
This is exactly the logic Smart Pick applies deliberately: it lets you keep the experience of picking a line (or checking one you already have), while nudging the selection away from the same clustering that makes self-picked numbers riskier to split, without ever touching your actual odds of winning.