So is insurance, yet millions of people buy it on their cars, their houses, their health, their very lives. The odds are stacked against you ever collecting more than you paid; if it were otherwise, would the industry even exist? Yet those who eschew lottery tickets, but wouldn’t think of living without buttloads of every kind of insurance, are viewed as prudent, wise and sensible. To each his own; at least I don’t have endure a tragedy to win at the lottery.
I am notoriously forgetful and slack, so I rarely get around to buying lottery tickets.
But when I do, I have a whole blissful Saturday afternoon fantasising about what I will do when my numbers are drawn that evening. It’s worth the $5.00, just for escapism.
Oh, and my cow-orker won 2nd Division in Tattslotto last weekend. It’s only about $15,000 (AUD) all up, but she’s still a bitch in my books :p. The maddest thing was that she rolled up to work on Monday morning, as per usual. I would still have been recovering from the hangover…
Fear Itself–
If you go bankrupt, you aren’t going to win the lottery. If you suddenly need a lot of money for some other reason, you’re not going to need the lottery. However, if you were to suddenly get very sick, you would almost assuredly be able to collect insurance. In other words, if you’re bankrupt and you don’t play the lottery, you’re really no worse off. If you’re sick and don’t have medical insurance, you’re pretty much screwed.
Yeah, you put more into insurance than you get out of it. But I think what you’re paying for there isn’t your medical services; it’s your peace of mind. We don’t have dental insurance right now because my dad lost his job, and the idea of one of us getting major cavities is just really, really alarming. We’d gladly pay the insurance rates just so we wouldn’t have to worry about it.
That being said, I might play the lottery someday. Mostly because I haven’t done anything “18 or over” yet, and I’m already 20 (well, other than seeing an R-rated movie, which is NBD).
How about choking the chicken? Will that help? I can do that. I’m good at that.
Well not entirely. Say the chances of 1 ticket winning are 1 in 10 million. The holder of a single ticket is 99.99999% chance of not winning. The holder of no ticket is 100.00000% chance of not winning. This represents a 0.00001% increase in your chance of winning by buying a ticket. Hardly infinite.
Your chances of winning are infinitely greater if you buy a ticket, not if you already have a ticket and you buy another one. It’s another way of saying you’ll never win the lottery if you don’t play it.
Someone just give me the winning numbers! The lottery is up to 75 million this week.
I’m in a lotto pool at work - we’ve got 121 tickets (everyone tossed in $5 except for one guy) so if one of our tickets hits and we don’t have to share it with anyone else, my share will be just over $3M before taxes. I also have 5 that I bought just for me.
Yeah, it’s probably $10 that I’ll never see again, but the fact is, eventually, someone will win, and my chances are just as good as anyone else’s. And $10 isn’t going to stop me from paying the mortgage. So all you party poopers can just go poop on another party. I will dream of spending my fortune.
And if I hit the big one myself, you’re all invited to a mega-DopeFest!
Is it possible to improve your chances of winning? Those lotteriesthat use air-suspended balls must show some evidence of bias (surely some balls are not perfectly balanced). If you could note some evidence of bias, surely you can improve your odds by avoiding those numbers that come up infrequently.
Has anyone monitored the “powerball” lottery? Any bias in the results, or are the number sequences totally random?
They change the balls frequently to avoid any trends due to variations in the balls.
I’m no math teacher (I don’t even play one on TV) but I do remember way back when I was first taught decimals & fractions.
1/3 = 0.3333333infinty… but everyone knew 3 thirds = 1. I remeber asking “Shouldn’t it really be .9999999infinity?”
The teacher smiled and said, “Yes but at .999999infinity, the difference between that number and 1 becomes so small it is virtually indistinguishable from 1.”
Now if your chance at winning that powerball lottery is 0.00000000000001 to 1, I’d argue that the difference between 0.00000000000001 and Zero is So Small as to make it virtually indistinguishable from Zero.
You forgot “What has six balls, and screws you twice a week?”
Second Star, the number of people participating in a lottery won’t affect your odds but yes, it would likely be detrimental to the amount you’d get to keep if you’re sharing the winning number with others.
A friend’s wife is a statistics professor and has her PhD in the subject. She plays infrequently but when she does she picks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 as her numbers since the odds for them are exactly the same as for any others.
A statistician winning with those numbers would become the stuff of legend.
I’ve won millions over the years from the lottery…
Every time I don’t buy a lottery ticket, I win $1!
Oddly enough, the converse isn’t true.
You would probably be surprised at the number of bankruptcies filed by people who have won lotteries.
There was one instance I was (tangentially) involved in where a lottery winner had three (yes, three) identical boats moored side-by-side in the same marina. Why? Who knows- but he filed bankruptcy and lost them all, because he couldn’t keep the payments up on all three.
Um, not to nitpick, but you have proved the wrong thing. The odds of not winning decrease by 0.00000001, which is not an infinite decrease from 100. The chance of winning, should you not buy a ticket, is 0. Should you buy a ticket, it is 0.000000001 or whatever. 0.000000001 (or whatever)/ 0 is infinite (well, strictly speaking undefined…)
I’ve got a lottery simulator on my site. The link is:
http://www.1728.com/lottery.htm
You can enter your numbers, hold down the ENTER key and in 20 seconds you will have played 50 years in this simulated lottery. See how well you do.
Incidentally, playing 1 2 3 4 5 6 in a REAL lottery is a BAD idea. You see, although lottery numbers are chosen at random, people who choose numbers aren’t very imaginative. I’ve heard that 1 2 3 4 5 6 is played by a lot of people. Would you want to share a $5,000,000 jackpot with 100 people ?
I believe the tub drowning bit, but I have to admit I’d like to see a cite on lightning, because I happen to believe it’s baloney, or else it’s a very liberal definition of being “Struck by lightning.”
Here, they hand out top prizes in the two big lotteries about 100-120 times a year. I have trouble believing 3300 people are being struck by lightning in central Canada every year.
Well, out of the 121 tickets that my office folk bought, we had 3 that had 3 numbers. That’s a $15 return on $121 spent. Um, not too impressive. Office tradition is to take the winnings and buy more tickets, so we’ll have 15 chances at $3M on Wednesday.
Two lucky weenies are sharing the $75M. I’m not one of them. Big surprise, huh?
Not to keep plugging that web page but please visit:
http://www.1728.com/lottery.htm
You’ll see what 50 years of lottery “investments” will get you.