If a jackpot is, say, $144 million or something like that, and the odds of winning are 80 million to 1, is it cheating to buy each and every number combination possible, thus guaranteeing a win?
The way I see it, the risks are high. If even one other person wins, your cut pre tax on the jackpot would be $72 million, and after taxes it would be around $60 million, so there’s a $20 million loss right there.
Other people have told me that it would be illegal. I’m not sure how that could be. There’s no limit on lottery tickets, and you’re allowed to pick your numbers.
Somehow I think the issue is whether or not you’d be able to do it. Most places won’t let you buy tickets with plastic, and not many people have $80 million in cash laying around. Best bet for legal questions would be to go to the commission that runs the lottery (probably have a website) and ask them.
You get creamed on the taxes. If you take a lump sum payment and after taxes you should net roughly 33% of the jackpot. If you don’t take the lump sum payment and take it over 20 years your take will be mitigated by interest payments on the money you borrowed.
Whatever the case buying every possible number is not likely to make you any money unless the jackpot is huge and no one else wins. Even then your take home amount after all your costs will be so severely cut that the motivation to do it isn’t really there.
I don’t know if the state limits the number of tickets a single person can buy.
Hey…it just occurred to me that if the jackpot is $144 million and you buy $80 million in tickets the jackpot is now $224 million. I don’t think I can manage the math but maybe it is a viable strategy.
From what i’ve heard it’s legal just not very possible on an everyday scale.
There are 14,463,212,400 (5352515049*42) different possible combinations.
You can pick five combinations at a time and it takes about three seconds to get five combos, but for simplicity sake lets cut the time it takes by a third to one second. So this means that you would need 2,892,642,480 seconds, or 33479.5 days if you were using one machine.
There was a professor who did all the calculations once, but i can’t find his site right now so you’ll have to settle for my half-asssed math.
Well, how about this: I just give the lottery commission the money since there’s no way I can lose, and then they do the drawing and if someone else wins I split the winnings?
This is really more a thought experiment than anything else, I guess, since realistically it’s a stupid thing to do, even with the linked evidence above to the contrary.
Where is the 53 coming from otto? Most of the lotteries I see don’t go quite so high. Course, I don’t really pay much attention to them–taxes on the innumerate mean less I have to pay!
One of the largest, if not the largest, lotto games in USA is the multi-state Powerball game.
Odds of winning are about 1 in 120 million. You can get paid in installments or a lump sum – it’s the total installments figure that is most widely publicized.
The jackpot has rarely exceeded $120 million as the cash option.
As the prize rises the number of tickets solds have usually been close to the amount of the cash option. So it’s likely if you could buy every number you wouldn’t be the only winner and have to split the prize.
Lotteries have been refered to as “a tax for those who can’t do math” because of the probabilities involved. If there was a way to predict what numbers would be chosen for lotteries, then there would be no point in having them. Your best bet for hitting a win is to wait for some sucker to buy several loser tickets from a scratch-off venue, then buying the winning 40$ or so ticket (hopefully). Truth is, house wins, hands down…always.
You missed the point, dnooman. The question was whether you could more or less fix the lottery and come away with a fairly substantial profit, like buying every spot on a roulette wheel and actually profiting from it.
You don’t need to purchase every possible winning number to make a profit from a lottery (you would just be mostly getting your own money back, and losing money if you shared the top prize). Lottery Syndicates purchase just enough tickets to make their money back on the smallest winning combination (ie 3 balls plus the bonus ball out of a 6 ball draw). You purchase less tickets (ie tens or hundreds of thousands, far more achievable without raising suspicions), have less investment, and make additional profit on the higher value prizes that you may win (at much better odds than a 1 ticket punter).
It is all down to statistics and probability - you can break-even with enough effort, and with some luck get the big one.
Simon Blakely
This was done in Ireland about ten years ago. At the time, there was only 36 numbers in the lottery, making almost 2 million combinations of six numbers. You got two combinations on a £1 ticket, so you could cover all combinations for £1 million. One bank holiday weekend, the jackpot was about £2 million but the real clincher was that a holiday promotion was running, paying a guaranteed £100 for successfully selecting four numbers (someone else do the maths). A syndicate managed to hit about 90% of the numbers before the lottery company realised what was up and closed down the points of sale.
The syndicate won but IIRC shared the jackpot with one other winner. They also obviously hit 90% of the four and five number prizes, boosting their winnings substantially. The taxman was after them because it was argued that this was a business venture rather than a game of chance and that their winnings were taxable. I’m not sure what the outcome was.
Shortly afterwards, the number of combinations was increased (I think there’s now 48 numbers) and guaranteed prizes outside of the pool no longer take place.
I think the important thing to remember is that the advertised value of a lottery jackpot is a future value (FV) and you need to think in terms of net present value (NPV), which is the current value of your future multimillion dollar jackpot, less taxes. Interesting point by Simon and Alereon, though, so it’s possible that if the total cost of all combinations was $80 million, then you could possibly bet that and be covered by a $160 million jackpot. Note that Whack-a-Mole’s supposition that you’re $80 million would increase the jackpot by that amounts is obviously incorrect. I don’t know (and not even sure it’s standard) how much of every dollar gets paid back in the overall jackpot. Almost certainly less than 25%, and then you’d need to NPV that as well.
They just redid the rules for powerball not to long ago, and in the update, they increased the number of regular balls, and i believe they decreased the number of “Powerballs”
