Yeah, just to be clear… most lotteries treat a draw of “1-2-3-4-5-6-7” the same as “7-6-5-4-3-2-1” or “3-1-2-6-5-7-4”.
i.e. match the numbers in any order and you win, rather than the order in which the number come out of the machine.
In the UK lottery they re-align the numbers into ascending order on-screen straight after the draw to make it easier for people to check their tickets.
And from what I remember of the Virginia lottery attempt they were carrying the risk that someone else would choose the winning ticket, but if the jackpot was $27m and you bought all the ticket combinations ($7m) you could share with two other tickets and still come out slightly ahead ($9m with a profit of $2m, but not sure that includes taxes).
The risk came from not buying all the tickets but that was just a straight issue of probability.
IIRC the delay in claiming the prize was because they had to physcially hunt through all the millions of tickets to find the winning one.
Why should they be treated special? If I want to buy a 1000 tickets, I have to stand in line and have the clerk generate my tickets, and it would a bit of time to print. But if I want tickets, that’s the procedure. You want a guaranteed win and convenience too? I say to those people, “Eat shit and get in line”.
I never said anything about where you would buy this special ticket. Maybe they’ll be in line behind you at the 7-11 waiting for your 1,000 tickets to print.
Also, the wait in line and buy is not the only procedure. Some states sell subscriptions online if you want to play the same numbers for every drawing.
Wasn’t there a documentary that followed a group that did this? I can’t seem to find it now—as I recall they were not able to get all the tickets bought and printed in time, so it was very tense at the end, but the winning number turned out to be one of the ones they had purchased. Anyone else remember seeing it?
Actually, reading Wallenstein’s link, I assume it’s talking about the same group— but I could swear I remember seeing something that actually followed and filmed them as they planned the thing.
Here is Oz there are special “System” tickets, that allow you to purchase a defined combination of games in a single ticket. Each ticket allows you to buy every possible game combination of the numbers selected. The largest possible selection in a standard lotto game is a System 18, where you pick 18 numbers out the possible 38 or 45 (the sizes of the lotto draw sets here) and every possible combination of six of those 18 is an entry. So 18,564 games on one ticket. They are, well, not exactly cheap. Still a long way to go for a full System 38 or System 45. But it is clearly viable to cover the games, needing only 435 tickets, at $18,000 each for a 45 ball draw. Given the coming Saturday jackpot is $21,000,000 there is clearly a possibility here. However given that the last four weeks had 5, 3, 5, and 9 winning tickets respectively, blowing $8M on a sure win is still a losing bet.
Interesting. So it has been used a viable strategy before.
Still, it would require a lot of coordination with the ticket sellers. The people that did it in Virginia only were able to get 5 million. I would think 176 million would be impossible to make happen without direct cooperation from the lottery.
For the group that bought 5 million, I wonder how they found the winning ticket. It must have required many people, how could you prevent theft?
I seem to recall a news reports from years back about a guy who made his living doing this. He even set up his own printing facility to churn out the tickets.
Anyway, I could see several issues as to why more people don’t do this, especially for games that have higher odds. If you take the lump sum, you end up a little bit more than a quarter of the total amount after taxes, so the jackpot would have to reach astronomical heights to really make it worth your while if you chose to go this route.
If you take the annuity, you’d probably end up on this particular Mega Millions jackpot with about $250 million after taxes, give or take depending on tax rates in the state where you live. Not a bad return on a $176 million investment, but that’s over 26 years, and if you $176 million to invest, there are probably other ways to invest that money that will give you a better return over the long term.
And of course none of that is taking into account that multiple people might hit the jackpot, which would split it up. And when the jackpot gets as high as it is now, you’re going to have a huge number of people who don’t regularly play the lottery buying tickets, increasing the chances that more than one person will get the winning combination.
Fine, as long as you’re prepared to fill out every combo you want to buy and not have the state do it for you. Why should it be made easier for you to essentially game the system?
That system18 thing in Australia was available here in the 80’s by a third party provider. It was a program that they called “wheeling”, where you picked x numbers out of the total (the “wheel”) and the system generated picks that covered the permutations such that you were guaranteed to win, provided that the winning numbers all fell within your wheel.
With no guarantee that you’ll have a unique winning ticket and could end up sharing, it would take someone who doesn’t understand the system to want to buy this ticket. The lottery already gives the government money from people who don’t understand probabliity, why not take it in bigger chunks from bigger idiots?
Question - If you did end up spending $176 million on lottery tickets, could you write that off as a gambling loss on your taxes, and just end up paying on the amount you won above that (which in this case would be about $300 million)?
See post 16. Someone needs to figure out how much would be won if every ticket were bought and the jackpot wasn’t shared. The jackpot’s the only shared prize, I think.
I took the odds from the wikipedia entry on the megamillions, multiplied by the total tickets you’d have and came up with $65,884,984 in non-jackpot winnings.
I’m pretty surprised to see that the return - even excluding the jackpot prize - is not so terrible. $66mm return for $176mm in lotto tickets is still clearly a bad investment, but you couple that with a $460mm+ jackpot prize (even assuming you split it with someone else), and the economics become more reasonable.
As stated before, the formula for a combination is n!/ r! (n-r)!, where n is 56 and r is 5. Next you need to multiple it by the odds of selecting the correct megaball from among the 46 choices.
So the formula is 56!/ 5! (56-5)! x 46!/ 1!(46-1)!
Simplified, that is: (56x55x54x53x52)/(5x4x3x2x1) x (46/1)
55 choose 5 = 3,478,761
3,478,761 x 46 = 175,711,536
The approximate cash option after taxes is around $210,672,729
Assuming you could buy every ticket, you could gain $34,961,193 assuming no split. If one other person wins though, you lose $70,375,172. Seems like it would be a very risky gamble.
As an aside, what would be the sweet spot in terms of betting? Obviously having all the tickets would give you 100% chance of winning, but it also gives you the most maximum outlay of money. I wonder if, by looking at historic trends, you could boost the odds somewhat.
Of course not. Each draw is a totally independent event.
What you might be able to do is to pick numbers that are less popular with the masses (7, 21…) so that if you do win, you are less likely to have a split pot.