I recall some years ago reading about a person who accidentally purchased 20 lottery tickets with the same numbers by accident. They realized their goof right away, and the purchaser claimed that the store wouldn’t refund their money for the extra tickets. But the store said they did indeed refund the extra money for 19 of them so those extra tickets were void. Then that number combination won the jackpot, and there were other winners who also chose the same numbers. Thus a big dispute arose over how much of the jackpot that person was owed. IIRC the lottery officials sided with the store and the person only won a single share, not 20 shares. I don’t remember any more of the story like which lottery it was or exactly when it happened, sorry.
So my first question is, has anybody ever actually won a larger share of some big lottery jackpot because they played the same numbers more than once in that single drawing?
Most big lotteries roll over the jackpot when nobody wins it. So the jackpot keeps growing and as it grows larger, this attracts more players who spend more and more money trying to buy as many tickets as they can. At some point, it becomes a statistical likelihood that all combinations will be covered (of course, many combos will have been chosen multiple times), and once that happens, it’s guaranteed that at least one ticket will win the next drawing.
A few years ago, when one of the big multi-state jackpots got huge, just before that record drawing the media was reporting as a fact that all number combinations had been sold. It would have been Mega Millions or Powerball; I can’t remember which one it was now. But does anybody know if this was just someone doing the math based on ticket sales and predicting that a winner was a statistical certainty, or did the lottery actually announce that all combinations had been covered? Do any lotteries do that as a matter of course?
To your second question, the lottery system knows what numbers have been issued and where they were sold. So once the winning number is chosen they just have to run a lookup command in the database. That’s why you have stories along the lines of “the winning ticket was purchased at this 7-Eleven but the winner has not come forward yet.”
Yes, I know the lottery computers keep track and it’s straightforward to check to see if all number combos have been sold. But my question is, has any big lottery with a million dollar or more jackpot ever actually announced it and a winner in the next drawing is guaranteed to happen? Also interesting, did any lottery announce the fact but only after the big drawing?
Last May I won $50,000 in the Powerball game, 4 of the 5 numbers plus the powerball. I was one of the 12 winners of $50,000 in the US for that drawing. When I redeemed the ticket, the gal at the Washington State Lottery office told me I was the only person to have that particular number combination.
The number drawn that I did not have was 25. The only number on my ticket that did not match was 52. One inverted number from winning $170,000,000.
I don’t know, but I strongly suspect it has never happened.
Why would people buy more tickets if they already knew there was a winner out there? And why would the lottery commission discourage people from buying more tickets?
This is an issue with scratch-offs. They continue to be sold even after the main prizes have been won, and some people don’t really check the status of remaining prizes before buying.
There have been attempts to buy every combination. One attempt was made for the Florida lottery which had a relatively small number of combinations compared to other big lotteries. They couldn’t get all the combinations because of practical problems, but they did win.
I don’t think they’d announce all combinations were sold because it would cut into sales as Antibob says. It’s not all that rational** Bubba**, but a lot of lottery ticket sales aren’t.
You can double your chances of winning by buying two tickets, but that improvement is negligible. Even buying one ticket barely improves your chances of winning.
Assuming that there are 50 million possible tickets, and all players select their numbers uniform randomly then, if my calculations are correct:
About 1 billion tickets must be sold to get the chance that every possible ticket has been sold up to 90%.
1.082 billion tickets must be sold to get that chance up to 98%.
1.231 billion tickets sold get that chance up to 99.9%.
I remember an opposite issue. Some provinces allow charity groups to sell scratch tickets. They come in a box set with a certain number of prizes per set, usually one big payoff. (So if all tickets sell, a guaranteed profit for the seller). Say, 1000 each $1 tickets with a big prize and a number of smaller prizes. Since they track payouts, at a certain point if the big one hasn’t been won, the remaining tickets represent a loss - sell 200 tickets, pay out $300 in outstanding prizes. The lottery commission had to remind sellers not to stop selling when this happened - someone was entitled to win the big prze.
About ten years ago, a fellow made the local news that he held TWO tickets for the top prize for a modest lottery of $120k. He had given the clerk his standard betting slip that he used every week. What he had forgotten was that he had already placed a bet earlier that week. In this case, there was one other winner. With one ticket, he would have taken home $60k, but his second ticket only added $20k to his pocket (A third ticket would have only added another $10k)
By my math, every time 34.6 million tickets are sold, you eliminate half the remaining unused numbers.
To eliminate 90%, you would need to sell 115 million. To eliminate 99%, you would need to sell another 115 million. To eliminate 99.9%, you would need a third set of 115 million (345 million, total)
Powerball has 292,201,338 different combinations. That would cost $584,402,676 to buy every ticket. There was a Powerball prize of $1.586 billion once, but there were three other winners so if you bought all those combinations for that drawing you’d still lose over $187 million.
I think you’d need to draw a distinction here between two types of lotteries: Those where players choose a combination of numbers of their liking (as, for instance, Powerball); and those where tickets come with one pre-printed ticket number on them, and you buy the ticket together with its number (the most famous example for that tyope is the Christmas lottery in Spain). In the latter case, all it takes to have a guaranteed win is for all available tickets to sell out - or, more precisely, all available ticket numbers: The Spanish Christmas lottery issues 160 series of 100,000 tickets each, so every lottery number exists 160 times, once in each series; for a guaranteed win, you don’t need all 160 series to sell out, as long as each number is sold in at least one series. Things are further complicated by the fact that it is possible to sub-divide a ticket into ten shares, each entitled to a tenth of the winning allocated to that ticket; but you get the general idea.
In the first type of lottery, on the other hand, there is no thereotical limit to the number of tickets sold, nor to the number of times any given combination can be selected by players, since each player chooses their numbers independently of other players (not so in the second type of lottery - there, each player can, obviously, only buy a ticket not bought by any other player. In such a case, it is possible (and common) for a very large number of players to play the same combination, meaning that it is much more difficult for each theoretically available combination to actually be played.
You’re solving a different problem. You want it 99.9% that some particular ticket (e.g. the winning ticket!) was sold. I wanted it 99.9% that every single one of the 50 million tickets was sold.
I’d check with the IRS before embarking on this scheme to lose less than $188 million. If they don’t allow you to deduct your $584 million cost, your after-tax loss will be much greater.
there was a scam where a syndicate would spend a small fortune buying tickets in a small state lottery and then not claim winners and then when it hit a certain point they’d flood it with winning tickets… took them a couple of years to figure it out…
