With the Megamillions lottery at 290 million, and the odds of winning at 1:135,145,920 couldn’t someone (with hundreds of millions) buy every combination, and come out winning $154,854,080 (assuming they’d win exactly $290mil)?
They would risk having to share with another winner, and winning only 19.7mil and actually losing bigtime if there were 2 other winners. Just wondering if my math is right. :dubious:
Do the math on the time needed to purchase 135 million tickets.
It’s been done before, in similar circumstances. I saw a TV programme about a guy who blitzed some state lottery that had reached that point a few years ago. He ended up only managing to buy 90% of the possible tickets, but still won. I can’t for the life of me find a cite, though.
A problem is that if he spends $135 million to cover all the combinations, and someone else happens to pick the right number too (a likely possibility), then he has to split the pot. And the pot is not $290 million in today’s dollars, is it? Isn’t that the sum of many years of installments, so that the present value is maybe half?
And the winnings would be taxable. What I’m not sure about is whether the ticket purchase would be deductible, but I think it would.
Yeah, they’d have to occupy tons of machines for those few days between drawings - I read something about that somewhere myself, and can’t find it now (I thought is was on this site). Highly risky if you couldn’t purchase enough of them. Even 90% total purchase seems too risky, but I guess the risk is appropriately correlated to the return.
My rough calculations, based on a 6-ticket slip being put through the machine every 10 seconds, is 434 machines working around the clock for 6 days.
BTW, what I do remember from this documentary (I hope I didn’t dream the damn thing!) is that the guy was watching this particular lottery for several weeks, as the jackpot built up - and before hitting it, had already pre-printed slips with all the combinations on them.
According to the Ohio lottery, the cash value of the $290 milliuon is about $163,656,860 before federal, state and local taxes.
You will also win plenty of of second through nonth prizes which are also taxed.
You may be able to write off all the tickets that didn’t win as losses to offset some of the taxes.
The documentary I saw on a guy who had a system to win involved getting permission to laser-print sheets of numbers that didn’t need to get run through the machine, and so he only needed to print out miliions and millions of numbers. He had just enough time to do it–he said if the lottery got too big, the chances of losing due to not enough time to print out enough numbers made the risk too great.
Also bear in mind that they’d get lots of less-than-jackpot prizes, too.
I don’t think buying all the combos is a good move at all. What you would actually win (assuming you won it all) isn’t $290 mill. It’s the difference between the jackpot and what you could have made with the $135 mill by investing it elsewhere.
$290,000,000 over 25 years is $11,600,000.
$135,000,000 invested at 5% is $6,750,000.
If there was one other winner, a real possibility, you would actually be losing $900,000 per year.
Why not set up a system where a guy can bet every possible combo on one ticket, like you can do at the track?
I’d really like to know how many kook m**illionairs are out there that would actually give it a shot!
It would make the lottery (at least temporarily) more interesting!
Wouldn’t it be better if you cut it off at about 70% of the tickets? That way your odds are very good, but you’re not necessarily going to have a bunch of different winners.
If you want to do this, you don’t try to purchase every ticket combo aiming for the main prize.
What you do is target the third or fourth prize level - ie 4 or 5 of 6 numbers in a 6 number + Bonus number draw.
You need to buy enough tickets to ensure that you cover your costs, and you will probably pick up some second prizes (5 numbers + bonus) and maybe a first prize to make your profit.
It’s still a lot of tickets to buy, but is not every combination, and the return on the lower prizes is more reliable that the risk of gambling on the first prize and then sharing it with several other winners.
The problem is that lottery commisions discourage this sort of block buying of numbers, and control access to machines, and monitor buying patterns to stop the syndicates who might try this.
Simon
But that’s not as much fun as turning on my t.v. and seeing that some whacked Richie Rich bought every combo…and ended up having to share the jackpot with someone else, thus winning the lottery and losing millions doing so! 
Bwahaha!
Important Lesson learned: the lottery is the worlds biggest sucker bet, no matter what! 
In other words:
“A Mule and his Funny are Poon Sarted.”