common sense duhhhh wrote:
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.
You sir are a complete dumb@ss!
HardLoper wrote:
DiscoGary wrote: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.
I don't know. What kind of load do you think they are seeing right now? All those people buying tickets at gas stations are logging into the lottery system just like I would be doing, and more than 1 billion tickets will be sold in the next few days, so their servers must be set up to handle it.
The real practical limitation would be how to give the online ticket purchasing site access to a large enough line of credit so that it would accept all the purchases.
It could be done, especially by anyone with $500 million to spend.
You clowns on here ... all math class failures. Take a set at the poker table.
With the instant pay out option (almost every takes) -- you can half your winnings, then half them again for taxes. Even the 1.3 billion would be whittled down to about 350 million.
The current odds are 1 in 284 mill. That's $584 million for every combination; already a huge f'ing loss.
Even still; some egghead crunched the numbers and over a certain amount jackpot, say $500 billion, there's about a 10% chance of 0 winners, 10% chance of 1 winner, 20% chance of 2 winners, 20% chance of 3 winners ... and so on to about 6+ winners having about a 10% chance as well.
Ipso facto, you winning solo with a mega jackpot and a fck-ton of people playing are not great.
The EV is definitely negative. Not to mention, you have a better chance of getting a blow-jay by Emma Watson after winning the Boston Marathon this year (and then predicting 3 consecutive coin tosses) than to come close to winning the PowerBall, but people are idiots.
HardLoper wrote:
You'd probably crash the webserver on their end, there's no way you want to rely on that.
The normal load would be huge during the day, and very light through the night. So they definitely could handle automatic buys in the early AM hours.
My computers would just look like a couple hundred very busy gas stations.
There is a fee associated with buying tickers online and also a person has to physically go to an outlet and purchase the tickets. Fail.
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.
DiscoGary wrote:
I don't know. What kind of load do you think they are seeing right now? All those people buying tickets at gas stations are logging into the lottery system just like I would be doing, and more than 1 billion tickets will be sold in the next few days, so their servers must be set up to handle it.
The real practical limitation would be how to give the online ticket purchasing site access to a large enough line of credit so that it would accept all the purchases.
It could be done, especially by anyone with $500 million to spend.
DiscoGary wrote:
The normal load would be huge during the day, and very light through the night. So they definitely could handle automatic buys in the early AM hours.
My computers would just look like a couple hundred very busy gas stations.
If there were 300 million tickets sold in a day, and say 10% of them were bought online, then to buy 292 million tickets you're basically sending them 10 times as much traffic as they normally get. If all the requests came from the same location it might get flagged as a cyberattacker. They might just choose to shut you down. I just wouldn't rely on a website staying up all day if making a $500M bet.
Brokers still have to physically purchase the tickets for you. Fail.
HardLoper wrote:
DiscoGary wrote:I don't know. What kind of load do you think they are seeing right now? All those people buying tickets at gas stations are logging into the lottery system just like I would be doing, and more than 1 billion tickets will be sold in the next few days, so their servers must be set up to handle it.
The real practical limitation would be how to give the online ticket purchasing site access to a large enough line of credit so that it would accept all the purchases.
It could be done, especially by anyone with $500 million to spend.
DiscoGary wrote:
The normal load would be huge during the day, and very light through the night. So they definitely could handle automatic buys in the early AM hours.
My computers would just look like a couple hundred very busy gas stations.
If there were 300 million tickets sold in a day, and say 10% of them were bought online, then to buy 292 million tickets you're basically sending them 10 times as much traffic as they normally get. If all the requests came from the same location it might get flagged as a cyberattacker. They might just choose to shut you down. I just wouldn't rely on a website staying up all day if making a $500M bet.
Here's a better question than the lottery.
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Yes.
If you have $500 million sitting around, there are many ways to double your money through wise investments. You wouldn't want to waste your money on an either-or proposition with substantial chances of losing everything.
There was roughly a one in three chance of no winner.
Switch. You would then have 2/3 of winning the car. Stay and only have 1/3.
MHall wrote:
Here's a better question than the lottery.
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
The Australian syndicate that bought 70% of combinations in the VA lottery:
. . . and the CNN article that seems to get the odds right for this one:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/11/news/powerball-jackpot-win-guarantee/
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.
Lol. If it was that easy to do, then 100 other people would also buy every combination and then it wouldn't be worth it to any of you.
♤♡♢♧ wrote:
Lol. If it was that easy to do, then 100 other people would also buy every combination and then it wouldn't be worth it to any of you.
Ha. There's no way to secure some other lucky soul from guessing the right combo, and if there was one other winner, then discogary would be a loser for buying every combo.
webby wrote:
The Australian syndicate that bought 70% of combinations in the VA lottery:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html?pagewanted=all. . . and the CNN article that seems to get the odds right for this one:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/11/news/powerball-jackpot-win-guarantee/
This was for a lottery with 7 million to one odds:
One chain, Farm Fresh, said it had sold 2.4 million tickets to a man who apparently managed the purchase for the group. The man went to the grocery chain's headquarters with cashier's checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The chain sent couriers to 40 stores to pick up the tickets. As identification, the messengers used the man's business card, with a code word added. The company's commission was $120,000, even though it returned $600,000 for tickets it did not have time to print
I love the VA story. It shows that cornering the market was virtually impossible . . . but not exactly impossible.
True, it was far smaller than powerball, but if it didn't break powerball rules (which it does), it wouldn't be impossible to do the same thing on a scale 50 times larger with the same labor model and a better payoff. There are probably 50 times more powerball vendors than there were VA lottery vendors, so it's just a larger scale effort. VA showed that there are enough minutes in a day to make it possible, if not plausible.
The risk of a split jackpot makes it a gamble, but the risk would be much lower than generally reported, since most powerball machines would be largely unavailable to other players.
BeardedBeast wrote:
Also, can you write off gambling winnings against losses? .
No you can't. But you can write off the losses against your winnings, up to the amount of your winnings.
No you wouldn't. You would have a 50/50 chance of winning.
debbie b wrote:
Switch. You would then have 2/3 of winning the car. Stay and only have 1/3.
MHall wrote:Here's a better question than the lottery.
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Nope, you're wrong. You have a 2/3 chance if you switch. Google "Monty Hall Problem".