Posted on 12/28/2017 3:09:15 PM PST by blam
The Powerball jackpot for Saturday's drawing is up to $384 million as of 11:00 a.m. ET Thursday. At the same time, the Mega Millions jackpot for Friday's drawing is up to $306 million.
Those are pretty huge chunks of money. However, taking a closer look at the underlying math of the lottery shows that it's probably a bad idea to buy a ticket.
Consider the expected value
When trying to evaluate the outcome of a risky, probabilistic event like the lottery, one of the first things to look at is expected value.
The expected value of a randomly decided process is found by taking all the possible outcomes of the process, multiplying each outcome by its probability, and adding all those numbers up. This gives us a long-run average value for our random process.
Expected value is helpful for assessing gambling outcomes. If my expected value for playing the game, based on the cost of playing and the probabilities of winning different prizes, is positive, then, in the long run, the game will make me money. If the expected value is negative, then this game is a net loser for me.
Lotteries are a great example of this kind of probabilistic process. In Powerball, for each $2 ticket you buy, you choose five numbers between 1 and 69 (represented by white balls in the drawing) and one number between 1 and 26 (the red "powerball"). Prizes are based on how many of the player's chosen numbers match the numbers drawn.
Match all five of the numbers on the white balls and the one on the red powerball, and you win the jackpot. After that, smaller prizes are given out for matching some subset of the numbers.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
They did the math? Is that a joke?
The ‘math’ is posted on lottery web sites. For Powerball, the jackpot odds are over 292 million to 1. The odds against winning ANY amount are about 25 to 1.
We regularly buy lottery tickets.
I know the math.
We do it for entertainment.
You are better off betting on random trifecta 50 cent boxed bets on the horse races.
It’s always better to buy 1 ticket because the odds are infinitely better than not buying one at all.
Maybe for the same reason that Obungler, Clinton, and the rest of the slime balls will continue to get away with their crimes. They are above the law.
The lottery is a game that the mathematically challenged play. I have degrees in Geology and Pharmacy and a lot of math. When the Texas lotto gets over 20 million I will play and also know it is foolish money spent. Wife person always gets up before me and checks the previous nights lotto. If one day I wake up and she is gone along with the lottery ticket I will know I won. I will hunt her down like a hungry dog! :) :) :) It is just a game but if you spend money you can not afford it is a problem.
I consider lotto tickets to be a “stupid” tax.
I have always said that if God wanted me to win the lotto I’d only have to buy one ticket. I did. I didn’t win. That was a couple of decades ago.
I did that. I bought one ticket a couple of decades ago, and lost.
My dad always called them the “idiot tax”....
Bought one scratch off ticket in my life. Did not win. Done, movin on...spending that money on BEER!
>
How come running a numbers racket is legal for the state, but they will throw you or me in jail for it?
>
Wasn’t that the gist of govt...when we were a Constitutional Republic? Govt *had* no authority/ability to do that which we could (not) do to each other.
Ponzi schemes such as SS/MediXYZ
State lottery/gaming
Theft (aka ‘welfare’), though it violate 4th/5th/13th
etc.
etc.
etc.
But, ask any egghead from HA-vard or the bowels, excuse me, ‘seat’ of power, how XYZ is valid given A1S8+ (or any plethora of Rights\Amendments) and the BS ‘logic’ spewed\bloviated will be nodded in approval from all levels.
See, we have *PRECEDENT* these days, no Originalism, no CORRECTIONS. I’d dare say if one were to broach the subject, one would get some tie in the slammer for ‘wasting’ the courts’ time\lack-of-standing\’frivolous’ suit.
Course, I’m SURE that’ll all change should we only ‘hold our noses’ in ‘18... /s
If you’re not in it, you can’t win it. Someone eventually will. A few bucks a couple of times a week won’t break most of us.
Of course, there are many more lottery winners who not only hang on to their winnings but increase their jackpots over time with shrewd investing and a conservative approach to money management. But those aren't the stories we want to hear.
Envy and hate are among our strongest emotions and thus we love to hear about others having a fall from grace. It's not fun to read about a lottery winner who, over time, turned a $20m jackpot into a $200m fortune. That's because we hate those people and we wish they were dead.
However, reading about people who blew a large windfall makes us feel better about ourselves. We can then rationalize not winning the lottery ourselves by pointing at those who did and lost it all. Those stories make us feel better about ourselves.
Again, it is human nature to hate people who are more successful than they.
I won $100,000 twenty years ago and lost it all day trading but made it back twenty years later because I learned everything I needed to know about the stock market which is NEVER SELL AT A LOSS EVER EVER EVER. I don’t care what stock it is, unless it’s some BS penny scam stock, EVERY stock will always eventually go higher than what you paid for it. I was a naive idiot when I got into the stock market, I thought it was like Vegas and gambling but it isn’t at all. You only lose if you sell at a loss. Every single stock I ever day traded on I would have made a profit on if I only held on to it and most not much longer than a year.
No respectable numbers racket run by criminals would have payout odds as bad as a state run lottery. They couldn’t sleep at night.
The article left out having an LLC own the ticket and having your attorney represent the LLC to pick up the winnings...
Extra credit: Make it an offshore Nevis LLC for protection and complete anonymity.
Extra, extra credit: have an International Trust be the owner of the Nevis LLC with yourself and spouse named in the private trust document as beneficiaries... along with others you choose... or charities.
Buy even one ticket for an expectation to win.
Buy zero ticket and the odds are zero to win.
The problem is in determining how much one spends on ‘the expectation’. I usually play 2 numbers when I do play. No more, no less — not even on the $300+ million lottos.
One time, I did get 4 of 6 numbers in a state lotto and won $117 for my $2 ticket. That $117 basically paid for the other times I played and got none of the numbers.
We have an office pool ran by a gambling maven.
She makes copies of tickets and distributes copies.
In addition, that $40 is not going to be used to buy something else as it is budget money for the month I did not need to spend.
One thing is for sure, I will not win if I don't buy a ticket.
The odds are so against you that you’d be further ahead by taking every dollar you intend to spend on lottery tickets and putting it in a jar and then banking it every couple months.
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