One in many trillions: Lottery player wins 2 games on the same day

San Jose Mercury News | December 12, 2002 | Nicole C. Wong

[Revolting cat!]

Dude, if he had invested that $124,000 over the years in the technology companies, computer manufacturers, disk makers, hot software companies, Internet startups, why, he'd have been a multi-millionaire a long time ago!

[Rodm]

Lottery = State Sponsored Covetiousness. The more we break God's Commandments the further we go into debt.

[Junior]

Lottery = Tax on the Stupid. The more money stupid folks give voluntarily to the government through the lottery, the less the government takes from me at the point of a gun.

[Condorman]

My cat's as fat as three or four ordinary cats now.

Or maybe it's because he's travelling so fast that he just appears to weigh 3 times as much as he actually does.

[redhead]

"The pair mused about buying a car and traveling to Italy..."

Nice work, if they can get it. I'd like to get a look at that car...

[Dan Day]

You've lost me. "Odds are" that what would happen?

He's pointing out that there's a difference between the odds of *someone* (anyone) in California winning two games on the same day, versus the odds of a *particular* person (say, "Joe Smith of 123 Main Street, San Diego") winning two games on the same day.

The former is a few million times more likely than the latter.

Likewise, there's a big difference between the odds of someone winning both games *whenever* (across several years of lottery games), versus the odds of them winning on a particular day/game (say, "the December 12, 2002 drawing").

When the article quotes the X-trillion-to-one odds, it was the odds of "Joe Smith" winning, if he bought only *one* ticket in each game, and played only on a *single* day (December 12).

Yeah, that's astronomically unlikely, especially from Joe's perspective. But from where *we* sit, since we don't much care who made the double win and what day they made it on (all we find interesting is that *anyone* could *ever* win two games in one day), the odds of *that* occurring are *much* more likely than a trillion-to-one.

If we estimate that 25 million people (1 person in 10) in the country plays the lottery (in any state) on a given drawing, and that there are two drawings per week, and state lotteries have been going on for about the last 15 years, then the odds of seeing anyone, anywhere, any time win a "double lottery" on the same day go from 1-in-23-trillion to around 1-in-590 -- quite a difference...

Then, if we factor in all the *other* bizarre lottery happenings which would have been equally newsworthy (parent/child or siblings each winning separately on the same day, someone winning the lottery the same day that something else unlikely happened to them, etc. etc.), and suddenly the odds of *some* bizarre, one-in-a-zillion even ending up on the news and all of us boggling over it becomes almost certain.

The same thing happens with the "impossible", weird-ass coincidences that we all experience from time to time. Yeah, *that* coincidence was damned unlikely to happen, but when you think of all the hundreds of thousands of weird-ass things that *could* happen, suddenly it's not so odd for one of them to hit us every once in a while on a regular basis. Any *one* of them is a one-in-a-million event, but with a million possible weird things around, the odds of *any* of them happening is reasonably good. And then when it does, we marvel at the "impossibility".

[Dan Day]

Lottery = Tax on the Stupid.

Not if you do it right.

Tip: If the current jackpot is greater than (cost-of-ticket times odds-against-winning), then the "house odds" are actually in your favor and in the long run you'll make money in the long run playing the lottery (as long as you *only* play it on those days when the preceding is true).

For the Texas lotto, this is when the jackpot is over 16 million dollars.

What happens in these cases is that all the people who lost on the preceding drawings (which is how the jackpot rises) are "subsidizing" your playing.

[IncPen]

There's a mathematical principle called the law of truly large numbers. Basically it says that when you have large enough sample sets, improbable events become common, or indeed inevitable.

If I'm not mistaken, this is related to chaos theory, and also is used for finding sameness in seeming randomness.

It seems to me I read a book wherein this type of math was used to pin down the location of a missing sub (missle?) on the ocean floor...

[IncPen]

not figuring up his opportunity costs. Assuming an average 8% return, that same $600 a month he spent on lottery tickets would have yielded him almost $2.3 million at the end of 40 years. And that's a much better bet than the lottery ;)

Beats Socialist Security, too...

[GregoryFul]

For the Texas lotto, this is when the jackpot is over 16 million dollars.

Does your calculation include the effect of taxes, and did you base it on the present value of the payments, or the lump sum payout? (Perhaps the advertised figure ought to be $50M before even odds?)

[IncPen]

Easy for you to say...