wouldyou wrote:
694million tickets were sold yet 1 in 292million was to win.
Something isn't adding up, the line was out my local small town gas station and down the street Lol. I'm willing to bet this is just a craze to get people to just go out and pay more taxes *play the lottery*
Having lots of player does not indicates anyone is playing the right combination of numbers. In fact, a lot of people could be playing the same numbers.
Hello, Fish wrote:
You can have seat at my table too, fish. Your odds do not double by simply buying another ticket. You simply have a 2 in 292.2 million chance.
You are correct. You simply doubled your chances, not decreased the chances by half. The point is moot.... buying more tickets only incresses your chances of winning from negligible to negligibl even a thousand fold increase is negligible.
AS a number of posters pointed out it is a long odds bet
but
those who do not buy a ticket have NO chance to win and those who buys a ticket have an Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie chance to win
Only 75% of possible number combinations were bought.
The way to look at it is that you spend $2 for a little entertainment of waiting for the drawing, daydreaming about the all the things you will buy, and so on. And then the next day you go back to work. The idiots who head to the store to buy $100 worth of tickets are just that, idiots.
If anyone did win that much money, they'd probably have to go into hiding or move to another state (or country.)
One other thing:
"You need $584 million to cover 292 million combinations."
That's not feasible to do, but even if you could, you'd still lose money. The lump-sum value of the $1.3 billion prize is $800 million. Figure you take away 40 percent for taxes, you're left with $480 million. So you've already lost $100 million. And if you're not the only one with the winning numbers, and you have to split it, then you've lost even more money.
Of course, if you had $584 million to begin with, then you don't need the lottery, do you?
I flipped a coin and it came up heads 5 times in a row - I thought my chances of getting tails was 1 in 2?!?!
Couldn't you deduct the cost of the 291, 999,999 losing tickets at $2 ea? Gambling losses are deductible against gambling winnings I believe. I think, absent a split pot, you would net about 129m.
The odds to win are one in 292.2 million. Seventy-five percent of all the possible combinations were purchased before Saturday's drawing, Grief said, and he expects that enough tickets will be sold to cover about 80 percent by Wednesday. About 95 percent of Powerball tickets have computer-generated numbers.
george oscar bluth wrote:
I flipped a coin and it came up heads 5 times in a row - I thought my chances of getting tails was 1 in 2?!?!
Wow... I hope this is sarcasm!
SeriouslyGuys wrote:
george oscar bluth wrote:I flipped a coin and it came up heads 5 times in a row - I thought my chances of getting tails was 1 in 2?!?!
Wow... I hope this is sarcasm!
Of course. COME ON!!
malmo wrote:
Take a math class wrote:1) At $2 per ticket that's not a bad payday for the lottery. Stasticly each ticket has a 1 in 292 million shot. Your odds are not cut in half if you buy two tickets. That's why.
2) At this point it would be worth just giving 292 million $ for every possible number and collecting the 1.3 billion.
1) You'll always have a seat at my poker table. Yes your odds are cut in half by buying two tickets. The odds go from infinitesimally negligible to infinitesimally negligible
2) It's physically impossible for you to cover every number combination in 4 days, even with 10,000 people working for you. First of all you'd have to have 10,000 buyers waiting in the wings. Secondly they would have to find a retailer willing to tie up their machine. Thirdly they would have to place 29,200 two dollar bets from a printed list during the allotted hours. Your total cost to cover all combinations is $585 million dollars!!!!
But for fun, lets say the lottery retailer are open 24 hours for 4 days. That's 5760 minites (4 days). You would have to purchase a ticket every 11.8 seconds.
To sum it up.
You need $584 million to cover 292 million combinations.
You would need 10,000 worker bees purchasing individul combinations every 11.8 sec from a list 24 hours a day for 4 days.
Those worker bees aren't going to work for just honey.
Anyone with $584 million has a lot better things to do than to give it all away on ridiculous schemes.
I buy my tickets online. It wouldn't take too much to automate the process. Once that was done, then you have a computer working 24 hours a day at high speed. If one computer isn't enough, you put 2, 3, 4, ... 25 ... 100s of computers on the job, how ever many it takes. Using Amazon cloud services it would take only a couple thousand dollars to do that. It is possible to play every single number without hiring a team of people to buy tickets.
Here's why:
There is obviously a large amount of repeats. But intuition would say that if there are 292 million combinations, then the probably that a person has a unique combination is one in 292 million. However, as each unique combination is assigned to a person, that decreases the odds of the next person having a unique combination.
Example:
The first person to buy a ticket has a 100% chance of having a unique combination. The 100 millionth person to buy a ticket could possibly have a one in 192 million chance of being assigned a unique combination, although its more likely to be about one in 230 million.
By the time we get to 694 million tickets sold, there is less than a 20% chance of obtaining a unique combination. That means a unique combination is assigned for roughly 5 tickets bought at this time. Keep in mind these are not exact figures.
If you would like exact numbers, apply similar calculations to the unique birthday problem (easily found using Google). Although it takes 367 people in one group to guarantee that there are two people with the same birthday, it only takes 22-23 to have a 50% chance of two people in that group to have the same birthday.
20 people are going to win the thing on Wednesday. 20 people are going to be devastated that they only get to walk away with 65 million rather than 1.3 billion
Cheap advise wrote:
20 people are going to win the thing on Wednesday. 20 people are going to be devastated that they only get to walk away with 65 million rather than 1.3 billion
if one of those 20 LUCKY people are truly devastated by only winning $65M, then they have other mental issues besides not being good at math.
cgray wrote:
Cheap advise wrote:20 people are going to win the thing on Wednesday. 20 people are going to be devastated that they only get to walk away with 65 million rather than 1.3 billion
if one of those 20 LUCKY people are truly devastated by only winning $65M, then they have other mental issues besides not being good at math.
Let's say you think you won $10,000 and you spend the day thinking about how you're going to spend it. Then you wake up the next day and find out you only won $500. That would be kind of disappointing.
No one is discussing that if you bought every number combination the probability that someone else also had the same ticket if quite high.
Investing that large of a sum is too foolish with the risk that you can essentially lose a lot IF the prize is split.
However, you would have several tickets that win less than the jackpot prize too.
For the lesser prizes, there would be a before tax total of $94,468,853 for the non jackpot winners. The total additional received before tax would have to be $489,933,823 to break even. In this case, if there was another jackpot winner, the losses are tremendous.
But the Jackpot splitting is the reason no one would do this.
Also, can you write off gambling winnings against losses? There are some implications of that. Still not enough to influence this decision.
Nobody has posted the correct answer.
A ticket is only valid for one draw, so the jackpot keeps going up after each draw where nobody wins.
Even if all 694,000,000 of those tickets were unique you could still not have a winner if they were spread out over two months of failed draws.
DiscoGary wrote:
malmo wrote:1) You'll always have a seat at my poker table. Yes your odds are cut in half by buying two tickets. The odds go from infinitesimally negligible to infinitesimally negligible
2) It's physically impossible for you to cover every number combination in 4 days, even with 10,000 people working for you. First of all you'd have to have 10,000 buyers waiting in the wings. Secondly they would have to find a retailer willing to tie up their machine. Thirdly they would have to place 29,200 two dollar bets from a printed list during the allotted hours. Your total cost to cover all combinations is $585 million dollars!!!!
But for fun, lets say the lottery retailer are open 24 hours for 4 days. That's 5760 minites (4 days). You would have to purchase a ticket every 11.8 seconds.
To sum it up.
You need $584 million to cover 292 million combinations.
You would need 10,000 worker bees purchasing individul combinations every 11.8 sec from a list 24 hours a day for 4 days.
Those worker bees aren't going to work for just honey.
Anyone with $584 million has a lot better things to do than to give it all away on ridiculous schemes.
I buy my tickets online. It wouldn't take too much to automate the process. Once that was done, then you have a computer working 24 hours a day at high speed. If one computer isn't enough, you put 2, 3, 4, ... 25 ... 100s of computers on the job, how ever many it takes. Using Amazon cloud services it would take only a couple thousand dollars to do that. It is possible to play every single number without hiring a team of people to buy tickets.
You'd probably crash the webserver on their end, there's no way you want to rely on that.
nochance wrote:
One other thing:
"You need $584 million to cover 292 million combinations."
That's not feasible to do, but even if you could, you'd still lose money. The lump-sum value of the $1.3 billion prize is $800 million. Figure you take away 40 percent for taxes, you're left with $480 million. So you've already lost $100 million. And if you're not the only one with the winning numbers, and you have to split it, then you've lost even more money.
Of course, if you had $584 million to begin with, then you don't need the lottery, do you?
If you took the annuity payment, it would seem to be a good investment, because you would be getting more money back than you put in, over the 20 years of annuity payments.
However, the reality is that the opportunity cost makes it a bad investment, even if it is a positive return. If you have that much money, there are better investments with lower risk.
Guaranteeing you win by buying every ticket combination doesn't guarantee that you aren't one of 2, 3, or even 4 winners, in which case you would lose money by splitting the pot with them.
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