Posted on 10/19/2005 8:48:57 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
DID ANYONE WIN?
sniff...I only got 2 numbers out of all my tickets. I just knew I was going to win. LOL Yeah, don't I wish. :)
Randomness has no memory.
Flip a coin in the air 50 times and it comes up heads every time. What are the chances of it coming up heads on the 51st flip?
Answer - 50/50.
So...why hasn't the lottery combo 1-2-3-4-5-6 been drawn yet throughout the history of lotteries?
The payout you would get would be less than the money spent on each ticket.
It is not worth it to buy all tickets just to ensure a win.
When you have that much money, you don't know what to do with it.
If you plan, however, you can turn that 50 grand into 3 million easily just by putting it in good interest-bearing accounts. Then you can go on a bit of a spending spree if you wanted.
If bell curves work on the lottery, it would appear there is not really any true randomness to it.
Some numbers have a hot streak in which they win two or three drawings in a row. Other numbers sit out at least a dozen games.
This can be determined by looking at a list of winning numbers for the past ten or twenty games. You can see patterns (Cue the snide FReeper remarks who'll say that I'm on LSD or pot or something)
You don't get it. There is no such thing as true randomness. Even the best systems break down and produce biases and patterns that can be exploited.
In the power ball lottery there are 140 million combos, in other lotteries there are different odds, depending on how many numbers are drawn. In all the different lotteries ever, there are literally billions of combined combos to be drawn. Not every combination hass been drawn because of the sheer volume of combos.
According to the poster of this article the numbers drawn tonight were 7-21-43-44-49 POWERBALL: 29
The odds of those same numbers being drawn in the next power ball drawing are exactly the same as they were for tonight - a figure I have heard is 140,000,000 to 1.
The same odds apply to 1,2,3,4,5,6 and any other combo you can come up with.
Even the best video poker machines aren't truly random.
Given enough time all numbers will occur with roughly the same frequency.
If it's not really random, then you have introduced another factor
Right. What you're saying is, there is no randomness, but the same 6 numbers would come up once every 140,000,000 draws.
Well, actually, since gambling losses are deductible up to the amount of gambling winning, it is.
Besides the sheer infeasibility of buying tickets on all the numbers, the flaw in the scheme to buy all the numbers is the possibility that you might split the jackpot with someone else and have a loss your investment minus half the lump-sum jackpot.
Better to not play at all until drawings like tonight's when the expected value exceeds the cost, and then just to play a few numbers as a jolly speculation.
iirc it's 1 in 165 million because of the powerball.
So you'd have to spend $165 million to win 100 million after taxes.
And if you won, there's no wayyou can guarantee you didn't have to split the jackpot with one or more other players.
That would depend on how many people played that particular night, and the odds that two people handpicked the same 6 numbers.
I didn't win dammit. I'll keep playing though. A couple bucks a week won't break me and it buys a very big dream.
Gambling losses are deductable to the extent of gambling winnings (Save your losing tickets)
Plus if you buy that many tickets you will have a great number of lesser winners too.
you would, but not really enough to make up for it all.
Someone tried this as part of a large group with a different lottery years ago... there was a show on it. They didn't win the jackpot,though.
The thing is powerball has recently changed it's rules to make this larger jackpots possible by increasing the number of balls played. Which makes any attempt to game the system that much more difficult.
And finally, it's a lottery. It's set up so the 'house' always makes money no matter what.
Hey!!
I'm series!!
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