I think you are neglecting the influx of ticket sales.
If I got together a SDMB syndicate to buy up every possible ticket combination, that would be an extra 175 million that would go to the lottery. A percentage of that would go to increasing the jackpot $476 Million.
I have no idea what percent of each ticket sale goes towards the jackpot. I am guessing somewhere in the 30%-40% range.
lets assume my hypothetical SDMB syndicate would add $50 to the jackpot. Putting the jackpot at $525 Million.
So who wants in?
PM me, with your vital information and I will get you in touch with Nigerian friends :dubious:
It’s taxed initially, but reclaimable for non-residents. For instance, if I go to Vegas and win a jackpot, I get a portion withheld, but also a receipt that I can use to claim it back (I actually still have one for about $15 that I’ve never bothered to claim).
What made that viable is that the lottery offered a special prize of £100 for any match 4 winning tickets. The normal prize for a match 4 winning ticket was around £15. The syndicate involved calculated that they would make their money back irrespective of winning the jackpot. They had teams of people going into shops buying tickets but even with that they couldnt buy all the tickets. And this was with a 6 from 36 lottery so a much smaller number of possible tickets. Despite not being able to buy all the tickets they still made money. a similar special prize for match 4 tickets hasnt been offered since.
I see, but my “objection” would be that you need to always keep the number of other people picking at 100, or else it skews everything too much. It’s also more realistic as the mega millions which offers a 1/175mm chance of winning will likely have 175mm tickets sold. So the number of picks (not including the investor) should equal the number of available combinations. So 100 choices mean 100 picks.
Now, if you go for a strategy of covering all the numbers, you expected value increases as the variance of the other people’s picks decreases. So more clustering is better for you.
With your strategy, you avoid the some of the downside (dead money), but I think there is a level at which your loss exposure is too great from a psychological perspective. I think the expected return should be slightly more, but the actual return will be more of a feast or famine type deal, no?
Completely agree. An investor or investment firm with deep pockets might be comfortable taking a one-shot bet given that the expected profit is positive. However, for your everyday individual investor, you’d probably only get comfortable with this strategy if you had the opportunity to participate in multiple lotteries and would therefore expect a relatively consistent and profitable stream of cumulative earnings.
My question would be, how could you physically do this? The highest denomination bill we have is $100. You would need 1,760,000 of them.:eek: That’s a lot of cash. Heavy, even. They gonna let you write a check that big? How big is the daily limit on your debit card? Even if you had 1000 confederates, each guy has to haul $176,000 down to the 7-ll. It’s not a Vegas casino where you can have an account with that much bread.
Your basis for your assertion is certainly incorrect. Foreigners have their slot winnings in Vegas withheld and are then able to apply for a refund of those taxes when they get home. I’m not certain why the lottery would be any different. In any event, you can “earn” money in Las Vegas and not have to pay taxes. Just be a foreign citizen.
In this case, no. Gamblers are allowed to deduct expenses from their winning but (and IANAA) I believe that if you have a net loss, you cannot deduct that from your other income.
