I’m sure you’ve seen the photos of many of those many delighted lottery winners! Yes, they do exist.
As we all know, though, winning the Powerball requires a lot of luck. For every smiling winner there are millions of people with nothing to show for their money.
How much luck does it take to win the lottery? According to this Powerball site, the odds of picking all six two-digit numbers correctly is one chance in 146,107,962. This is bleak, but how bleak? Some state lotteries show you how to do the mathematics, but I doubt that this complicated math can counteract the heavy advertising done by the lotteries–advertising that takes advantage of widespread innumeracy. How can the small chance of winning the lottery be conveyed in a visual and understandable way?
I decided to use plain M&M’s (not peanut) and a football field for my thought experiment. I didn’t really do this demonstration, but you could. If you’d like to do it, just go out and buy 146,107,962 M&M’s. Instead of actually buying the M&M’s, I used mathematics.
I decided to allow all six lottery numbers to serve as the coordinates for ONE M&M in a big pile of M&M’s. I started by wondering whether 146,107,962 M&M’s might cover a football field (the field between the goal lines, not including the end zones). A football field, between the goal lines measure 300 ft long x 160 feet wide = 48,000 square feet. That equals 6,912,000 square inches. Based on my experiments with M&M’s at home, I found that 17 M&M’s will cover about 3 square inches. 146,107,962 M&M’s would thus completely cover three football fields, from goal line to goal line.
So . . . here’s the proposition. Assume that ONE M&M was painted silver and mixed into the M&M’s that covered 3 adjacent football fields that had been completely covered with M&M’s. Then assume that a lottery company allowed you to pay $1 to walk out into those 3 huge fields blindfolded to pick up only one M&M with a tweezer–the silver one. Would you do it, or would you rather keep your dollar? Or how about this option: would you scoop up one liter of M&M’s (enough to fill about one quart, which you could do by scooping up a bit more than a square foot) for $549?
BTW, I refered to this site to determine how many M&M’s there are in a specific volume. It turns out that one liter (which is a little more than a quart) of M&M’s is about 1098 M&M’s.
This thought experiment helped me to understand the low odds of winning the lottery, but I’m curious. Would this visual have the power to cure anyone else of the urge to spend their hard-earned money on the lottery? Could this serve as an “anti-lottery ad”?
If none of this cures you of the urge to play the lottery, consider this: coming into large sums of money will only temporarily change your happiness level.
I like David Letterman's formulation the best:
Your chances of winning are *just slightly* higher, and only a little bit, not so much you'd notice, but just *slightly* higher…
…if you actually buy a ticket.
At least after paying a dollar to find an M&M, you'd be able to eat it gaining something for the outlay of cash.
Too bad lottery tickets aren't edible.
From the Skinner school of behavioural modification, behaviour is modified by providing a reward for a particular behaviour.
In lotteries, the reward is not actually the prizes that are offered, but the opportunity to win one of those prizes. This is true in most forms of unskilled gambling.
Great thought experiment that definitely puts the probability in perspective. However, somebody asked me to pay a dollar to pick a silver M&M out of three football fields' worth, blindfolded, and then told me that silver M&M would be worth $100 million, I might actually do it. After all, it's just $1 and it sounds kinda fun.
But if I did it twice a week, or even once a week, all year long, I'd be a fool.
More important than the odds is the expected return. If the jackpot is 200 million dollars (after taxes), then a dollar could be considered a decent deal for a ticket. Of course, when the jackpot is that high, sometimes multiple people will buy the same winning numbers and have to split the winnings.
It's pretty complicated, but it's *sometimes* worth buying tickets.
I prefer the "ruler" version.
Imagine a 150km long Ruler..picking 1 Millimeter..that's your chance
You can do the maths for your miles/inch system on your own;)
"Lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math" — unknown
I buy tickets. To me it is worth going to bed (I never check the night of) dreaming of what I could do (and not have to do) instead of working at a job I only marginal like and worring about the morgage, car payments, …. And yes, I would still work. I would just be working for myself running my own business. Something I think about doing if not for a morgage and 3 little ones.
Another thought, half the money is spent on tickets is returned to the public and used for schools, roads, etc… That is if it was a "cash" ticket. The annuity (sp?) tickets should return 100% or so but the state will have to wait 22 years to use it. That is why almost all states have them and also why it is called the poor man's tax.
Yeah, expected value is what should be considered, not the odds of winning alone.
If someone offered you $10 to draw a card out of a bag that had 4 decks with a different colored back each, and you had to draw the right card of the right color deck, it'd seem like a waste of time and money. However, that can't be decided until you know what you get when you DO draw the right card. If they're offering you $1,000 to get the right card, keep your money. If they're offering $2,500, you have an edge and will win in the long run. There's 1 right card and 207 wrong ones in there, so–statistically–out of every 208 drawings you'll lose $10 207 times and win $2490 once.
With something like powerball, the odds of winning are very low, but the payout is variable. In theory if it gets high enough, it's a positive expected value. The main problems with that are taxes and chances of splitting a jackpot make the required jackpot very high, and of course due to the magnitude of variance you can easily play regularly and never get a jackpot. The lesser winnings (3 right, etc) help mitigate this since they're extra chances to win, but taken individually they're each a negative expected value.
There's a nickname for the lottery. It's called "the stupid tax."
The thing is, if you're not poor, i.e. the loss of that dollar or five or ten, will not prevent you from eating for that day or week, then in my opinion, what that money buys you is a fantasy. A fantasy if never having to work again (probably), a fantasy of providing a life of leisure for you and however many family member you feel like involving.
Disclaimer: This is only true for playing the powerball, and even then, only when it reaches stupid levels. People who play the other lotteries, scratch tickets, daily numbers, etc. out of some weird hope that they're going to be rich, each and every time they purchase a ticket, well, those people are delusional at the least and self-destructive at the worst.
Seeing it either photoshopped or actually put together somehow – seeing it visually – would have a huge impact.
Alternately, a page with 1 million (or more) pixels on it, all black except for one red, would do something similar.
I, for one, play the lottery. I have absolutely no expectations of winning. I understand probability, statistics, and combinatorics, and I'm quite familiar with the concept of numerical scale. And I'll keep playing the lottery 😉
Why? I enjoy it. I don't spend much money on it, and I don't get wrapped up in it. It's quick and painless, within my means, and entertaining.
One of my cow-orkers would pick numbers like
1 2 3 4 5 6
his rationale was that if that did win, he probably would not be sharing the prize with anyone else.
His friends would say "Well, that will never win", to which he replied, correctly, " it has exactly the same chance as any of your numbers.
This is a very effective thought experiment. I'll have to pass this on to some of my lottery-happy family members 😛
In the last ten years I've spent maybe $1000 on lotteries, and only managed to "win" about $50 back. It's enough to make you want to start a lottery system of your own sometimes….
i truly believe that the only "real" chance you have at winning the lottery albeit a very very small chance is if u play exactly the same numbers for every single drawing in your particular local lottery. play the same numbers everytime until u die and u have a slight slight chance of those number eventually coming up. altho i did hear the last huge powerball (like 300 mill) went ona auto pick so go figure.
OK-we all sit here reading blogs and thinking in the abstract about this issue. Erin is right I'm afraid. More and more the modern world is set up to punish those who are not good abstract thinkers: lotteries, "war on terror", negative amortization loans, ad nauseam. The strong cannot continue to prey on the weak, weather we are talking mental or physical strength. In the same way that we expect society to protect the weak against the physical predations of the physically strong, I'm afraid we must abandon libertarian predilections and consider how we can effectively constrain those who would prey on the simpler members of our society. If you're reading this, you are among the more powerful members; I think it is a moral obligation for you to consider these issues and participate in making these decisions.
The fact is somebody does win eventually. They win because they bought a ticket. The odds are against everyone that plays accept for the one that wins. So to me that means there is something else in play. I like to think of it as luck. If you're lucky you win. Besides what's a dollar to a loser, not much these days. So why not play your luck, just don't give up the day.
You've had too much crack, Dave.
Sure. Lotteries were set up by the strong to prey on the weak.
Part of the lottery in Virginia helps support the school system, so if I play and lose, some of my losses go back into the community. If I play and win, I'd probably be spending a lot of that money in the community. I understand that there is pretty much zero chance of winning, but if I don't play at all I have zero chance of winning, anything greater than zero is at least a chance.
I play the scratch-offs sometimes, 1-in-4 is a much better chance than almost zero. Never figured out how to play the powerball, don't really care to.
"I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or or not."
Fran Lebowitz
I always tell people, suppose you buy a ticket on Friday hoping to win the Saturday Powerball. The Saturday drawing happens and no one wins. What this means is that if everyone who purchased a ticket between Wednesday's and Saturday's drawing had sent their ticket to you (some of these with $100 play), your house would not only be full of tickets but it would take you months to go through them all – AND YOU STILL WOULDN'T WIN!!
My advice: play once in awhile if you like but never play more than a dollar. Putting up $100 at a time really doesn't increase your chances and really is the downfall of most of the poorer players.
Back in the early days of the Florida lottery, when the odds were 14,000,000 to 1, (They're worse now.) I remember telling my daughter that Tampa Stadium holds 70,000 people. Then, I said, imagine a row of 200 Tampa Stadiums. That's 50 miles of stadiums at four per mile. There's only one chance in 200 that you'll even be in the same stadium with the winner.
Charlie, I do believe you are retarded.
The only guaranteed outcome is if you don't buy a ticket, then you won't win.
A couple of thoughts:
1. The odds are against you. But the only chance you have of winning is to buy a ticket. The cost of entry is low, the reward is high. In fact, the ratio is so out of wack as to invite speculation.
2. You'd have to buy almost 150 million tickets to ensure a win, and even then you run the risk of sharing. But I suspect that there is a threshold where the risk is worth it. Having said that, I remember reading some where that even if you could buy that many tickets you couldn't sort them in a year to find the winner
3. It's a cheap dream. I don't drink. My clients make me nuts. If I pick up a pack of gum and a Quick Pick on the way home, I spend the whole commute thinking what I'd do with the money. By the time I get home, I forget the nuttiness and I'm there for my wife and kids
Having said all of that, it galls me that the state is sponsoring this.