This one is pretty random, but I thought I would talk a little bit about lottery odds, because I assume that a potential jackpot over (Dr. Evil voice) ONE BILLION DOLLARS will draw people out of the woodwork. If you have no interest at all in this topic, I get that. But if you’re perhaps someone that rarely or never plays the lottery, but you’d like to participate this once just for kicks? Let me clear a couple of things up for you.
Is playing the lottery “a good bet?”
No. It’s not. I took a statistics class in college, and my professor categorized these big-jackpot, multi-state lotteries as “a tax on people that are bad at math.” He’s not very far off. You’re not going to win. Your odds of taking home that big prize are precisely 302,575,350-1. Those are really long odds.
However…
I’m also a poker player, and many decisions on the felt are calculated using EV, or expected value, to help make your decision. Simply put, it sometimes means that making a play with very difficult odds of coming through—like staying in a hand when there are only a couple of cards left in the deck that can make you a winner—actually make sense based on the cost to do so compared to the potential win.
Using that logic…if you assume that there will only be one single ticket with the winning combination of numbers, playing the lottery is technically about an even EV play with the take-home lump sum amount sitting north of $600,000,000 after taxes (The math: it would cost $605,150,700 to buy every possible number).
But anyway. I got off topic. What I’m saying is that with a jackpot in the ten figure range, I think taking a shot for $2 is perfectly fine. It’s fun to play the “what would I buy first?” game. Or the “where would my multiple new houses be?” game. Or the “exactly how many ridiculous vehicles would I buy?” game. These are all thoroughly enjoyable ways to spend a few minutes with your friends or co-workers, or just daydreaming by yourself.
So let’s talk odds, because I have seen some misinformation out there.
The odds of winning the top prize do not vary based on the size of the jackpot. They are static. They don’t change if you pick your own numbers, if you let the computer do it, or if you select them based on reading tea leaves at the bottom of a magic mug you purchased from a leprechaun. Any and every single play has the same odds (I’m leaving out extraneous stuff like the “multiplier” nonsense, and I’m not factoring in the chances of multiple jackpot winners—because that doesn’t change your odds, it would just decrease your prize).
There are a couple of ways to look at this. First, I’ll make a gambling comparison to a casino game, roulette. People come up with “strategies” for roulette. These are nonsense. All of them. EVERY single bet* at a roulette table provides the house with the same edge of 5.26% using a double-zero American wheel. This means that you could literally grab a handful of chips, sprinkle them randomly over the numbers, and let them fall wherever they may…and your odds are the exact same as that guy tracking every spin result on a card with a little pencil and meticulously placing bets based on what is “due” to come up. The wheel does not have a memory. It’s counterintuitive, but it is never “time” for a number or a column or a color to come up. Each roulette spin is an independent event, and each time, there are 38 possible results. 18 of the spots are red, even if red has come up 37 times in a row. Say it with me: the odds don’t change.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t increase your chances of “winning.” But it costs more to do that. At roulette or in the lottery. You’ll see lottery ads say things like “PLAY MORE TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING!” and that’s technically true. Just like if you bet on more roulette numbers, your chances of “winning” go up. I mean, you can bet on all 38 numbers and guarantee that you “win,” which would actually mean losing a small amount of money every single time.
If you buy two tickets for this big, upcoming jackpot, yes…you double your chances of winning. But imagine you are at the beach. If you pick up a grain of sand…a single grain…and then you pick up another one? You also just doubled the amount of sand you have. Same concept. Say you pick up ten grains. Or twenty. Or a hundred. Your “amount of sand” has increased a lot compared to that first grain. But are you realistically anywhere closer to having the whole beach, i.e. the jackpot?
Hell no.
So…sure, go pick up a ticket. Play your favorite numbers. Or meaningful birthdays. Or something randomly selected for you, known as a quick pick. You get to dream about getting a staggering amount of money. Somebody is probably going to win on Friday. And the chances of your ticket being the one are just as good as any other ticket. Just don’t go blowing your whole paycheck on a pocketful of sand because you think it means you’re going to end up with some beachfront property.
* The one bet I’m talking about is called the “basket,” which is a bet on both green zeroes and the numbers 1-3, and it actually has *worse* odds than everything else on the table. And yet, I’ve seen people play it.
Well, I’m one of those who’ve never played this lottery. Today my girlfriend and I were near Woodstock, NY and stopped for gas. We saw the lottery sign and I said, “I think that’s the one that’s over a billion dollars.” Of course we had to each buy a ticket thinking if we buy it in a different state than our state (PA) we’ll have a better chance of winning😂. That was our logic and I’m sticking to it😂😂. Even though I know we probably won’t get one number, we had a lot of laughs today saying what we’d do with the money if we won. So, tomorrow when I learn I won the jackpot, I’ll be DMing you to let you know I’m paying off all of your debt😁. I want to be the Lottery Fairy!! If only…
When we were coming up with ideas of stuff we'd do with the money?l, I totally forgot about you playing poker. We definitely need to do some famous casinos, like Monte Carlo
Actually, I think we should just get a place in Monte Carlo on our real estate
Buying venture! It's so beautiful there. And I can speak passable French!