[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
The lower the payout, the better the odds.
[/QUOTE]
Well, sort of. Depends on what you’re calling “odds”. The more likely you’ll win something, yes. But why even play the lottery for small stakes? Would you play a ticket for $1 where you had a 40% chance of winning $2 (including your own dollar) back? There’s no chance of winning big there - very low variance, you will most likely quickly and steadily lose money along the predictable lines. You’d basically be systematically giving your money away, without the fantasy benefits of having a shot at the big prize, or whatever.
As far as the odds go, in terms of expected value, paying $1 for a 1/20th shot at $10 is the same paying $1 for a 1/2000000th shot at $1,000,000. Given the choice, though, going for the former just seems even sillier. It negates the whole “hey, I’ll take a shot, what the hell” aspect of the big prizes.
[QUOTE=Plynck]
We all spend money on ephemera. Where do you draw the line? Why should someone judge how we spend our own money? I’m under no illusions as to my chances, but daydreaming is just as entertaining as any other pastime, especially during a dreary day at work.
[/quote]
I think the difference here is the amount of self delusion and stupidity. If you spend $4 on a cup of coffee, you’re fully aware of what you’re getting out of the deal, and have decided it’s worth it to you.
However, a hardcore lottery player (I’m not talking about the one ticket a week type) is pretty much always delusional. They don’t understand what they’re buying. They’re throwing their money away because they’re stupid.
And yes, I’m going to say stupid. Other people in this thread have said “not necesarily stupid, just bad at math” but that’s not true. You don’t have to understand how to calculate the exact expected value of betting red on a roulette table to understand that multimillion dollar casinos are built on the profit of people doing that very thing, and inherently, it must be designed to work against you. You don’t have to understand math to understand that lotteries are a big money maker for the state - why? because they don’t pay out nearly as much as they take in.
And so if you buy tickets specifically because you feel like you can somehow win money - by feeling out some set of magic numbers, or whatever, that you can somehow beat the system, that’s not only a lack of understanding of the math involved, but that’s stupidity.
And the math needed isn’t very hard. If you have a “pick four” type lottery - where you picked a number between 0000 and 9999, and if you won, you got $500 (IIRC, that’s how it worked in Ohio), it doesn’t exactly take a high level of math education to figure out that having a 1/1000 shot at getting 500 if you win is a bad value.
There are people who go to the casinos and gamble with money they can easily spare, and understand that they’ll probably lose, but they find it fun, and so the lost money is equivelant to spending money for another form of entertainment. I don’t think those people are stupid - they’re just spending their entertainment money that way. The same can apply to someone who buys one lottery ticket a week - the entertainment value, the excitement of the drawing, or whatever, might be worth it to them, even if they realize it’s not a good bet.
But it’s the people who constantly spend money they don’t have, who are convinced that they are due, or that they can somehow beat the system, or that magical fairies sprinkled pixie dust out of their ass over their lottery tickets who should legitimately be looked down upon by rational people.
I’m reminded of a joke that went something along the lines of: A devout religious man has struggled financially all of his life. He prays, and says that he’s always been a good man, but that he could really use some help with his financial hardships. Nothing happens. For months he prays, and eventually asks God why he hasn’t found a way to help him. God responds: “Well help me out here, buy a lottery ticket or something.”
As someone earlier in the thread said - that first ticket can buy you some weight to your daydreams. The second ticket has no value.
It’s interesting to note that any progressive jackpot system can eventually become profitable - that is, have a positive expected value - for every ticket sold. Ignoring the possibility of splits and taxes for a moment, if you spent a dollar on a lottery where your chances of winning were 1 in a million, but the lottery paid out a million and two dollars, every ticket you bought would, in a sense of probability and expected value, expect to turn a profit. Of course, the variance is extreme. And in practice, you’d have to factor in the likeliness of splitting the prize into the equation, and the profit the taxes would take. But there can be a time when, on average, you’re making money.
I remember years ago some sort of company… organization… something tried to capitalize on this very thing. Once the jackpot was high enough, they hired thousands of people to go buy every possible number. I can’t recall what ever came of it.
I worked at a gas station for a few years, and had to deal with this stuff all the time. It seems that there’s a lot of overlap between people who are hardcore about playing the lottery, and people that are rude as hell. Regular I’d be swamped with people - have a long line, be running around hectically - and the lottery players would demand that I sit there and enter all of their numbers manually into the machine, for several minutes, holding up an entire line of customers. Sometimes when I told them to fill out the scan sheets, they’d act offended, as if I were making unreasonable demands on them. Or they’d give me an entire stack of tickets to run through because they were too lazy to check them. For the most part, the more money they spent on the lottery, and the more picky they were about how it was done, the more rude and obnoxious they were.
Edited to add:
I bought a lottery ticket once. I felt pretty silly doing it.
I can’t remember exactly why, but a strange series of coincidences had happened one day, a bunch of “huh, that’s weird” type things. And at some point, later in the night, one of the customers recommended I buy a lottery ticket - I can’t remember why. Anyway, it was a series of strange coincidences followed by that recommendation, that made me say “hey, what the hell - if magical fairies are trying to shit out fairy dust on me, I’ll give it this one shot today” - knowing it was ridiculous, but remembering the joke I just recounted, and figuring what the hell, I could try it once.
Of course, nothing came of it.
