How come running a numbers racket is legal for the state, but they will throw you or me in jail for it?
If you’re worried about too much risk vs reward in the power ball or mega million lotteries, play it safe with your money & buy some bitcoin.
Our Founding Fathers played lotteries.
Sheesh. Nothing wrong with spending a few bucks on a dream.
That is a lot of gymnastics to go through to show you that the ticket is a sucker bet, but so is the pass line of a craps table over time.
The only way to certainly win is don’t play.
It’s a very bad idea to buy a ticket... except of course for the lucky dude that wins. The concept is that wagering a negligible dollar or two, for a very distant chance to have 300 million drop on your head, is pretty sensible unless you’re utterly broke.
Someone buy me a ticket and if I win I’ll pay you back.
Had a Boss that told me lottery tickets were a tax on people who were bad at math. I told him that at 200,000,000 to 1 the odds were infinitely better than getting rich working for him.
The grand prize ticket may be a high-risk little reward situation for MOST ALL the buyers of the lottery ticket, but not for one - the winner.
BFL! I’m off to buy my tickets before I read this.
If I spend money on a lottery ticket, I consider it entertainment money, like a movie. Throw away essentially.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.