Posted on 12/12/2002 11:02:03 AM PST by new cruelty
SAN JOSE, Calif. _ There's winning the Lottery. But winning two big jackpots? On the same day?
Angelo Gallina beat the incredible odds, and on Wednesday the Belmont retiree claimed his payoff _ $6.6 million, after taxes, for holding the winning ticket from both the SuperLotto and the Fantasy 5 games on Nov. 20. It's the only time in the 17-year history of the California Lottery that's happened. And experts said the odds of doing it are mind-boggling.
The odds of winning SuperLotto are 1-in-41 million. For Fantasy 5, 1-in-575,000. But for both?
"This is just amazing, astronomical," said Stanford University statistics professor Tom Cover as he calculated the probability of the double-header. "Oh brother," he muttered before announcing the odds: 1 in 23.575 trillion.
Cover said the odds that an individual player will win improve if he or she buys multiple tickets, but this run of luck is "still very, very rare."
Gallina has been betting against the odds since the game started.
"I dumped a lot of money in it," explained Gallina, who spends about $600 each month on the two games. "I was hoping I'd get it back."
The retired machinist for Southern Pacific Railroad buys an average of 20 lotto tickets a day with rental income. "That's the entertainment," he said. "It saves a trip to Reno."
Gallina bought the winning tickets on Nov. 20 for that night's SuperLotto $17 million jackpot and the Fantasy 5 $126,000 jackpot. But he and wife Maria will receive considerably less for choosing the lump-sum cash prize.
Gallina, 78, said it made more sense than waiting around for the 26 annual payments.
The pair mused about buying a car and traveling to Italy, Maria's homeland. Gallina said he'll probably splurge on the children, too.
"We've got two boys _ ages 38 and 33 _ and I think I'm going to have to buy them shoes," Gallina wise-cracked.
He also won't have to worry about saving money on motor oil and cat food.
"I'm collecting rebate coupons," Gallina said, "but now I'm going to throw them all away."
Or maybe it's because he's travelling so fast that he just appears to weigh 3 times as much as he actually does.
Nice work, if they can get it. I'd like to get a look at that car...
He's pointing out that there's a difference between the odds of *someone* (anyone) in California winning two games on the same day, versus the odds of a *particular* person (say, "Joe Smith of 123 Main Street, San Diego") winning two games on the same day.
The former is a few million times more likely than the latter.
Likewise, there's a big difference between the odds of someone winning both games *whenever* (across several years of lottery games), versus the odds of them winning on a particular day/game (say, "the December 12, 2002 drawing").
When the article quotes the X-trillion-to-one odds, it was the odds of "Joe Smith" winning, if he bought only *one* ticket in each game, and played only on a *single* day (December 12).
Yeah, that's astronomically unlikely, especially from Joe's perspective. But from where *we* sit, since we don't much care who made the double win and what day they made it on (all we find interesting is that *anyone* could *ever* win two games in one day), the odds of *that* occurring are *much* more likely than a trillion-to-one.
If we estimate that 25 million people (1 person in 10) in the country plays the lottery (in any state) on a given drawing, and that there are two drawings per week, and state lotteries have been going on for about the last 15 years, then the odds of seeing anyone, anywhere, any time win a "double lottery" on the same day go from 1-in-23-trillion to around 1-in-590 -- quite a difference...
Then, if we factor in all the *other* bizarre lottery happenings which would have been equally newsworthy (parent/child or siblings each winning separately on the same day, someone winning the lottery the same day that something else unlikely happened to them, etc. etc.), and suddenly the odds of *some* bizarre, one-in-a-zillion even ending up on the news and all of us boggling over it becomes almost certain.
The same thing happens with the "impossible", weird-ass coincidences that we all experience from time to time. Yeah, *that* coincidence was damned unlikely to happen, but when you think of all the hundreds of thousands of weird-ass things that *could* happen, suddenly it's not so odd for one of them to hit us every once in a while on a regular basis. Any *one* of them is a one-in-a-million event, but with a million possible weird things around, the odds of *any* of them happening is reasonably good. And then when it does, we marvel at the "impossibility".
Not if you do it right.
Tip: If the current jackpot is greater than (cost-of-ticket times odds-against-winning), then the "house odds" are actually in your favor and in the long run you'll make money in the long run playing the lottery (as long as you *only* play it on those days when the preceding is true).
For the Texas lotto, this is when the jackpot is over 16 million dollars.
What happens in these cases is that all the people who lost on the preceding drawings (which is how the jackpot rises) are "subsidizing" your playing.
If I'm not mistaken, this is related to chaos theory, and also is used for finding sameness in seeming randomness.
It seems to me I read a book wherein this type of math was used to pin down the location of a missing sub (missle?) on the ocean floor...
Beats Socialist Security, too...
Does your calculation include the effect of taxes, and did you base it on the present value of the payments, or the lump sum payout? (Perhaps the advertised figure ought to be $50M before even odds?)
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