Who of you have bought any tickets for tonight’s drawing?
I’ve bought 5 lines. So I’ve reduced my odds from 76,275,360:1 to 15,255,072:1. :D:D
This is one of those situations that almost begs for a consortium of people to get together and spend $75 mil to cover all the possibilities.
As long as there were no more than 4 winning tickets, they’d come out ahead.
Personally, I’d rather be part of a large group pooling their chances on something like this, than just buying tickets on my own; $1M would do just fine for me. $320M would be so into overkill territory. Other than buying the O’s from Peter Angelos (now there’s an idea ;)), I can’t imagine what I’d do with that sort of cash.
In which states can one buy Big Game tickets, anyway? Shows how much attention I’ve been paying.
Offhand, I know Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia.
Looking at their official website: also Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey.
AWB - you’re kidding on the odds thing, right?
I don’t really understand anything that involves math – but I do know you didn’t reduce your odds down to 15 mil plus.
Offhand, I’d guess making five distinct wagers reduced it to 76,275,355 to 1.
I just did a story on Friday’s big jackpot for the paper I work for. A math instructor at a local college pointed out that the odds of winning The Big Game roughly equal flipping a coin and having it come up heads 26 straight times.
For perspective, your chances of getting killed in a lightning strike are 1-in-30,000 according to the University of Oklahoma.
All that said, will I be buying my tickets this afternoon? Shit yes.
“We’re here at Milossarian Stadium, watching the Detroit Red Wings take on the …”
I saw this bumber sticker the other day:
LOTTERY: A tax on people who are bad at math
err… bumper
AMSTERDAM, May 9 (Reuters) - The owner of a small Dutch tobacco shop won 10 million guilders ($4.1 million) on the lottery – by mistake.
Having accidentally printed up more tickets for the draw than he managed to sell, he was forced, by law, to buy the remainder himself, Dutch news agency ANP reported on Tuesday.
Because Dutch lottery ticket sellers print the tickets themselves, they are usually careful not to do so until a customer has ordered them, to avoid being left with remainders.
But the day after the draw for the national “Queens Day” state lottery, the anonymous Utrecht tobacconist found that among his forced purchases was the winner.
This looked like the appropriate thread to put this newsflash in 
AWB:
I’ve bought no tickets at all, and I figure my chances of winning are just about the same as your
Manual sig line #34
kbutcher, I’ve heard it as “A Tax on the Stupid”.
I think that if you make a part of your weekly budget, then you are throwing your money away. At the same time, I can justify spending $5 or $10 on quick picks today, as a on time thing. I think I spent $5 on the lotto about 3 years ago when it was at $140 mil, and nothing since then. What’s ten bucks? Next time I go out and drink I have 2 less beers.
Gentlemen, I kindly invite you and anyone else, to this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=23830
AKA Suck up to Shirley. 
AWB was closer to the correct number.
Assuming there are 76,275,360 combinations, as AWEB said [which agrees with my calculation: ((50!/45!)/(5!)) x 36 (bonus ball)] then the odds on one ticket are 76,275,359:1 while the odds with four tickets are 76,274,356:4 – or 19,068,839:1
Opus is also correct. 19million to one odds is close enough to zero for most purposes, as we all know
grins I’ve seen that bumper sticker too and I also heard that you have a better chance of being struck by lightning then winning the lottery. My Mom did win $10,000 once in the BC Lotto (Yes it was Canadian dollars but thats still a neat little amount) That was before I was born though and they paid off bills and stuff with it.
I, however, am an idiot. AWB bought five lines, not four, so the correct odds are 76,275,355:5 = 15,255,071:1
(odds notation = [chances of losing]:[chances of winning]; 1:1 odds means a 50% chance, not 100%)
There’s an interesting article about all this at msn.com right now. http://www.msnbc.com/msn/403831.asp?cp1=1
My favorite quote: “A man is hundreds of times more likely to suffer a heart attack between the time he buys the ticket and the drawing than he is to win the jackpot,”
I will be anxiously awaiting the results of tonight’s drawing. I am in a 6-way pool–we each chipped in 2 bucks.
To me, the actual odds are irrelevant. Buying a ticket raises your odds from zero to infinitesimal, and infinitesimal is way better than zero.
I heard a joke once about the lottery. It was about a guy who kept praying to god to help him win the lottery. The punch line was god speaking down from the heavens: “Willya meet me halfway and buy a ticket?!?!?!” I figure if there is an god up there who concerns himself with such things, and he does want me to win the lottery, I’d better meet him halfway. I try to buy a ticket once or twice a year.
You know the chances of winning are 1 in a little over 76 million. I was wondering if someone bought 76 million dollars in non-identical tickets their chances of winning would be 1, so they would win $350 million. Getting $274 million free. Oh but there is a gift tax too.
Once, when I was in an evil mood, and someone asked what I’d do if I hit the remarkable jackpot of $12m (in a two million to one game) I joked that I’d use it to ‘buy out’ all the tickets the next time something like this happened, etc. etc. – thereby harvesting every truly overblown jackpot
(No, I’m not really that evil, but I long ago decided that my special charitable project would be anonymous, so I don’t tell anyone what it is)
Since then, I’ve pondered the possibility of someone doing this, But it would be tough getting tens of millions of entry cards (you can’t just swipe them from you local gas station). After that, the banks of automated marking machines, the squads of flunkies to take them to thousands of lottery agents (76 million seconds = 150 years at 24/7, so you couldn’t buy a lottery agent for exclusive use of their machines), and the huge task of sorting, checking and filing the actual tickets (it’s be a bummer if you lost the winning ticket, wouldn’t it?) would be pretty routine.
I doubt very much if any Lottery would accept a single bulk order “direct from the source”, if you will.
Yeah, I’m a jerk for details… but someday you might be grateful.
Not debating the ratio thing.
My way of figuring: there are 76,275,360 possible combinations; buying only one means that I have a 1 in 76,275,360 chance of winning. Buying 5 means I have a 5 in 76,275,360 or, reducing, 1 in 15,255,072. If I’d bought a million unique numbers, I’d have a 1 in 76.27536 chance.
It was here in Virginia that an Australian group tried to buy up all the combinations. They got most of them entered and did win. But they did a couple of things that are now against the rules. One was that they bought a lot at a non-retail outlet. They made an arrangement with some convenience store to process their play slips behind the scenes. Now all Virginia Lotto tickets must be purchase at a retail desk or a self-serve machine.
The Australians had to pre-print all the combinations on some 1.4 million play slips. (You just can’t ask for all random, as there’d be no guarantee that they’d be unique.) With only that many and their behind-the-scene data entry, they still couldn’t enter them all in time. For the Big Game, 15 million payslips would’ve had to have been processed in only 4 days.
But, the winning combo - 1 2 12 33 37 +4 - is only the 313,564th combination if they’re all listed in numerical order. So had you started playing every combo and only got a third of a million of them played, you would’ve won! :D:D:D:D
To capitulate:
Odds are listed as losing to winning. So the odds for winning the Big Game lottery are 76,275,359:1 against.
The probability is listed as all possibilities to winning possibilities. For the Big Game, the probability of winning is 1:76,275,360.