Posted on 02/15/2006 7:12:58 AM PST by grundle
That is wholly completely 100% false. The chances of last week's numbers winning this week is the exact same as any random number winning. I know it's difficult to understand but it is fact.
You have to divide that number by the number of balls since the order selected doesn't count, then multiply that number by the number of powerball chances, since it is selected out of a differrent set of balls. If the number you can select is from 1-55 for the first 5 numbers and 1-42 for the powerball, the correct formula would be ((55*54*53*52*51)/5)*42. The powerball number can be the same as one of the previous numbers.
Absolutely. However, with more people playing, the odds are that you will split your pot which has happened in the past with very large jackpots. So although "the odds of guessing all the numbers remain the same irrespective of the number of tickets betting" the odds of you having to split your pot with another person who picked the same numbers increases with the number of players (which would decrease your winnings). The odds of you having to split your pot also increase if all the numbers are less than 31 because a lot of people choose numbers based on birthdays.
If they sell 300,000,000 tickets and don't get a winner, then we know that the number of choices is higher than that.
I think it's 56x55x54x53x52x56, but it could be worse than that. I can't remember how to deal with the powerball. I think that a couple billion to one.
If it is 6 numbers, then I'd think it is:
6/55 x 5/54 x 4/53 x 3/52 x 2/51 x 1/50
There is no replacement and one of the remaining numbers must be selected each time.
That gives about 21 billion choices to select from and odds of about 28 million to 1 that you'd win.
Do they have a separate set of 55 to draw the powerball from?
I outlined the possibility of buying every single combo in an earlier post, highly unlikely by random chance though theoretically possible. Doing it on purpose doesn't sound smart to me. It's a lot of money and you figure with the jackpot that high there's going to be serious lottery fever so the likelyhood of a duplicate is pretty high. I wouldn't even contemplate such a venture until the 1 shot payout was at least twice preferably three times as much as the number of possibilities, which would probably a list advertised "value" of 5 or 6 hundred million in the lottery.
That's just what they did.
At some point in their lives, most people dream of winning the lottery. But few people go as far as to buy every possible winning combination in a bid to guarantee they will scoop the jackpot. But whenever there is a huge lottery jackpot anywhere in the world, you can be pretty sure that is exactly what will happen. If the mathematicians and statisticians show the chances of winning a huge payoff is right, then the betting syndicates move in. Around the world their strategies differ but a common theme is that they find a small shop with a lottery terminal and then buy it from an astonished shopkeeper. They shut the shop to the general public, connect the lottery to their computer and start buying every combination possible. Soon the shop is knee deep in lottery slips as the syndicate tries to cover the 14 million or so potential combinations before the draw. A week later they sell the shop back to the owner at a substantial loss – and leave with a few million in local currency.So the lottery can never go without a winner. If it gets high enough, then syndicates will purchase every ticket combination.If this seems fanciful – or insane – you only have to look at the Australian syndicate led by Stefan Mandel. They managed to keep their existence relatively secret until the syndicate hit the big one, a single ticket which paid $27 million in the 1992 Virginia State Lottery in the USA. It was the fourteenth big lottery win engineered by Mr Mandel and, as it turned out, his last major coup.
Simply explained, his syndicate waited until a lottery anywhere in the world had rolled over its jackpot for weeks on end. When the jackpot was, say, £20 million, but there were only 8 million possible winning combinations, his team would move in and start buying. Mathematically they calculated they could make between 120% and 400% return on their money, depending on the numbers drawn. If a popular series of numbers came out – numbers under 31 are played far more often than numbers over 31 because people choose their friends’ and families’ date of births – they would win less, but they would still be ahead on their investment.
"That is wholly completely 100% false. The chances of last week's numbers winning this week is the exact same as any random number winning. I know it's difficult to understand but it is fact."
I know you did not understand what I wrote.
Do you understand what an independent event is? It means that the current event/drawing is NOT dependent on prior events/drawings, which is the same as what you wrote above, except that you also did not read carefully what I wrote in the rest of the post.
W/o knowing the actual rules of the game, it's impossible to calculate the odds. Here are the rules and the odds:
Game Rules
The numbers picked for the prizes consist of 5 white balls picked at random from a drum that holds 55 balls numbered from 1 to 55. The Powerball number is a single ball that is picked from a second drum that has 42 numbers ranging from 1 to 42. If the results of these random number selections match one of the winning combinations on your lottery ticket, then you win something.
Odds of winning all 5 numbers and the PB:
5/55 * 4/54 * 3/53 * 2/52 * 1/51 * 1/42 = 1/146,107,960.
Your formula is wrong. Should divide the numerator by 120 (5!), not 5.
That's correct -- each one is an independent event. That therefore makes this statement false: "a number that last came out 8 months ago has a lesser chance of coming out again in the next, say, ten drawings, than a number that came out during the last 2 drawings." The numbers have an equal chance of coming out again no matter what happened in the past.
Oops, yes, that is correct.
One has a better chance of winning one of these scams as one has of being struck by lightning while standing on one foot in the middle of Death Valley.
Voltaire was right.
It was also he who observed that "It's dangerous to be right when the state is wrong."
The odds of winning are 165 million to one. The jackpot is 365 million. I have better than 2 to 1 odds going in.
(_o^o_)
Of course I was only talking about the math, not about the dipsticks.
Errr -- let us have your new email addy after you win and move to the islands...
(_o^o_) is the symbol for "wise ass".
Everybody loves a**.But NOBODY likes a _o^o_
Whoo Whoo
lol Nice one!
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