When Kentucky started the lottery with scratch tickets one of my coworkers, who was flat - dead broke, spent $1000 on a roll of scratch offs. He and his wife spent a weekend scratching off the cover and then on Monday he cashed in about $750 worth of winning tickets. A loss of 25%.
The Kentucky Lottery Corporation has a jingle that goes: "Somebody is bound to win, might as well be you." My family has changed that to: "Most people are gonna loose, and it will probably be you."
Actually, given the odds, they did remarkably well. Although I play the Powerball, I do it with money that I would normally spend elsewhere, by not going to movies, or other things I could be spending it on. It works out to $5 a week, which isn't going to hurt me. But it's astonishing to see how blind most people are when it comes to lotteries. I guess things were slowing down with the Powerball, the multistate lottery when somebody came up with this winner of an idea. "Lets add more numbers, and promote it as a good thing!" They added more numbers to choose from, effectively reducing the odds of winning, but promoted it as "More ways to win!" They did increase the minimum winning jackpot from (I believe) 10 million to 15 million.
Mark
The house always win.