Looking over the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes materials, I see that the estimated odds of winning one of the prizes is one in 1,700,000,000. One chance out of one billion seven hundred million. Even figuring that some people get very serious about entering and send in multiple entries, how do the odds get that long?
They don’t simply draw a winner from however many entries they get.
Instead, they in effect print up 1.7 billion entry tickets and mail them out. And they’ve pre-selected one of them to be the winner. IF that person sends it back.
More realistically, let’s say they know that for every 100 mail pieces they send out they get 2 back. So that’s 1 in 50 or 2%. So they don’t need 1.7 billion mailings. Instead they need only 34 million. Which is about 1 per every 3 households in the US.
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Do you think they really print up 1.7 billion tickets?
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If they say that there’s 1/1,700,000,000 chance that someone will win, don’t they have to be sure that winning number is at least sent out?
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And if they send out “only” 34,000,000 mailings, why wouldn’t the odds of receiving the winning number then be “only” 1/34,000,000? I’m still confused by this.
(p.s. LSLGuy, re: your sig: That day coincided with the day my city stopped being a geographical and political entity and became a market.)
It’s tough to know how they actually do it since their website is deliberately vague about how it operates. So strictly speaking I’m not offering GQ-quality answers, but rather semi-informed speculation.
The key thing about their process is that it’s NOT simply a matter of drawing a ticket from all the tickets returned and then declaring that one the winner. We know that for certain because they explain a backup award process to be used in case the pre-selected winning ticket is not returned. So the odds do not depend on how many tickets are returned. Or at least they don’t depend solely on the number of tickets returned.
No, I don’t think they print up 1.7 billion physical tickets. Which is why I said “in effect”. My example of them considering their average return rate for tickets is one plausible way for them to trim the actual ticket count required. I suppose there could be others but I’m not interested enough to try to invent other ways they could play their game. Sorry to not be able to provide a clear & unequivocal answer.
Sweepstakes are not lotteries or are they considered gambling. They are promotional and advertising schemes primarily. As such, most of the rules/regulations in the US governing sweepstakes are so that they are not to be considered gambling.
There are no requirements that the winner will only be drawn from the eligible entrants. There is no consideration paid for entry into the sweepstakes. There also doesn’t have to be a winner. You do have to describe how a potential winner is chosen.
ETA: However, for the promotions to be successful year after year, it is in the best interest of the sweepstakes originator to show winners so that people feel like they have a chance of winning and thus will enter the sweepstakes.
Ed McMahon died in 2009, which affects the odds considerably. 