(Oie, missed the edit window – Addendum to post #100)…
Just adding that, in the Spanish Christmas Lottery, you have a certain number (let’s say, 12345) and there is a series of tickets (divided in “décimos”) for sale with that number.
So, you can perfectly buy several tickets with 12345 in them.
If 12345 happens to win the big prize (€3,000,000 euros), you will get €3,000,000 for every ticket you have with 12345.
If you bought a single €20 “décimo” instead, you get €300,000.
If you bought a €2 share of that number, you would get €30,000 to be paid by the person who originally bought the tickets (!!)
After this 1986 scandal, the issuing of “shares” was more regulated, and mechanisms were implemented for checking that everything was on the up-and-up.
I fail to see how the “Win up to” phrasing covers anything. By that logic, the lottery could put “Win up to $10,000,000” even when the maximum prize was $75,000. In both cases you can win amounts less than the amount they advertise, but you can’t win the amount advertised. What’s the difference.
I appreciate Gnome’s posts, which frankly make this whole point meaningless due to the reality of how the contests work and the actual claim made. But what the heck, it’s the pit, I like to argue about stats and lotteries.
Yes, and that’s a lot different from “no one can ever win the grand prize, because it doesn’t exist.” (Which would be the case if the lottery claimed contestants could win up to $10 million, even though the highest prize available was only $75,000.)
a) The grand prize is $75,000. The grand prize has already been distributed. The second-place prize is $25,000. You print a ticket that says “up to $75,000”.
b) The grand prize is $25,000. You print a ticket that says “up to $75,000”.
a) You no longer have the chance to win $75,000.
b) You never had the chance to win $75,000.
ETA: You could argue that in a), you never had the chance to win $75,000 either. But that would not be true - you had just as much chance as person X, who did win the prize.
In my opinion, the difference is that the tickets being sold were already printed. Or am I mistaken?
I mean, the lottery is not printing tickets as the lottery progresses, but they print them all in one go in the beginning… Right?
(maybe I am horrendously mistaken and I am making an ass of myself, but well…).
If that is what they are doing, how can they be held responsible for tickets being sold with the “up to $75,000” message on them? Unless you want to print tickets that say “win up to whatever the maximum unclaimed prize is”, which definitely doesn’t look as attractive…
If you pick up a nonwinning ticket, you cannot win the grand prize. Your chance of it is zero if you pick up the wrong ticket. It does not matter whether someone else has already picked up the winner, or whether that somebody is going to pick it up in the future. Your chance is zero if you pick up the wrong ticket.
It would be nice to know what it actually says on the ticket.
The real problem is that we live in three dimensions with the fourth only existing at a point, if we lived in four dimensions, then it would not seem odd at all that the winning ticket was “located” elsewhere in time. He really needs to sue Albert Einstein.
I can’t believe some people are so stupid as to be still arguing this three pages in. muttrox, DanBlather, I’m looking at you - your arguments are foolish, LHOD has explained this several times and since you still have not got it, I see little point in trying again. However, I will try to make it as simple as possible:
The lottery company prints all the tickets at once.
One of these tickets will win the purchaser $75,000.
The tickets are randomly distributed, so anyone who buys one has an equal chance of winning.
The advertising for the game is printed at the same time as the tickets, and includes disclaimers and the true odds of the game.
When someone wins the top prize, the lottery company does not necessarily know immediately, so it is unreasonable to demand that they immediately change the advertising - which has disclaimers in it anyway.
Any way of running the lottery other than the above to eliminate the “unfairness” you seem to perceive would drastically reduce the revenue, either in extra administration costs or unsold tickets, probably causing the whole lottery not to be viable.
The player can normally find out easily whether or not the top prize has been won before choosing to play the game.
It depends on many things. If you run a contest that has one (or a small number) of top prizes, and if they use that top prize as the primary selling point of the contest, and if the expected value of a ticket changes drastically depending on whether the top prize is still available, then yes they should stop selling tickets once that prize is no longer available.