
How to play Powerball so you don’t have to share the jackpot - b_emery
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/12/how-to-play-powerball-so-you-dont-have-to-share-the-jackpot/
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tunesmith
Or (tongue in cheek), you could always buy 2-3 tickets that all have the same
numbers. That way if you win and someone else wins too, you still get most of
the money. :-)

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dkokelley
True, but I imagine for most people that going from never winning a lottery to
winning a fraction of a lottery is still a much bigger step than winning a
fraction of a lottery to winning a larger fraction of a lottery. If you want
to max out your odds of a life-changing win, be OK with sharing. :)

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mleonhard
Letting the computer choose randomly is not optimal, since the computer may
choose one of the commonly hand-selected numbers. A better method is to build
a list of commonly hand-selected number, then have the computer choose a
number that is _not_ in that list.

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dkokelley
This method helps to improve the expected value from a lotto ticket (though
it's still far less than the ticket price), but I'm curious what happens if
someone purchases one of every combination. I hear that the odds of winning
are something like 1 in 292 million. If it's only $2/ticket, isn't it nearly a
sure thing to buy 292 million sequential tickets? Aside from splitting the
jackpot with others, your expected outlay is $584 million, and your return is
($1.5 billion)/(number of winners). As long as there are < 3 winners, your
expected return is 1.5-3x your investment.

Aside from the feasibility of buying/tracking 292 million tickets and the risk
of > 3 winners, am I missing anything?

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ck2
$1.5B is only if you take the payments.

It's something like $900 million lump sum.

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dkokelley
Good point. A more nuanced calculation would look at the discount rate for
that money, but even then it seems like better odds than Vegas.

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me_again
My tongue-in-cheek scheme: Operate a "lottery disappointment insurance"
company. For (say) $1.50 you register your numbers with us, and we promise to
pay out what you would have won had you bought a $2 ticket on the real
lottery. Any large insurance company could easily afford the payout, and there
should be sufficient spread between the official ticket price and the expected
win to make it profitable.

Only downside is that if by some fluke it is not already illegal, it would be
made illegal in a flash.

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pavel_lishin
Isn't this the same as running a lottery, but outsourcing the winning-number-
generation?

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me_again
Heavens, no. That would be gambling. This is insurance. Entirely different.

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zappo2938
Everyone Is Freaking Out About The $1.5 Billion Powerball, And The Stats Agree
[1]

[1] [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-
powerball...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball-
lottery/)

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tempestn
One thing I've considered in the past is that it would be fun to play the
previous draw's winning numbers. First of all, having just won the lottery, I
would think most people wouldn't bother to play the next week, so you clear
out anyone regularly playing those numbers. Also most people intuitively think
it's nearly impossible for the same numbers to be drawn twice in a row. (Which
of course it is, but no more nearly impossible than any other set.) So maybe
you wouldn't have to share. And if you won, you'd be an instant celebrity.
However, 1) I really wouldn't want that kind of attention, and 2) I bet other
people have the same idea, so it'd probably totally backfire.

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kybernetikos
Some quick calculations seem to indicate that even with sharing and tax taken
into account, buying all tickets would be fairly profitable with the prize at
this level, so why has nobody done it yet?

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bryanlarsen
Expected value calculations are very hard to do here, because you need to
estimate the number of people who will be buying tickets, which you need to
calculate the odds of sharing a prize, as well as to determine the prize
amount. And estimation is really hard because there's never been a prize this
big.

FiveThirtyEight[1] estimates between 550 million and 1.2 billion tickets will
be sold. Their best estimate is 1 billion tickets sold, giving odds of sharing
the prize at 97%.

This makes the Expected Value of a $2 ticket $1.34. If you bought one ticket
of every number, you'd be guaranteed to win, but after splitting the prize
with the other winners and paying taxes, you will have lost money.

The powerball is a crappy lottery -- most other national lotteries give out a
higher percentage of their intake. For instance, Lotto 6/49 in Canada reaches
a par expected value around the $40 million dollar range.

The real losers of lottery schemes like this are the people who buy tickets
when the prizes are low.

1: [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-
powerball...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball-
lottery/)

~~~
maxerickson
What's the difference between the several hundred million losers of this draw
and the tens of millions of losers of the draw a month ago?

You seem to be saying there is one, but I don't get what it would be.

(I bought a ticket, I think it's fun to buy one once in a while, so I'll be
one of the losers tomorrow)

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bryanlarsen
There's no difference between the losers, but there's a pretty big difference
between somebody who won $20M and somebody who won $1.5B at the same odds.

~~~
maxerickson
So according to the maths it sucks to be the person who wins $20 million?

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brianpgordon
What readers of the article really want to know is what the _least_ picked
lottery number is. That will maximize the expected winnings. ;)

This paradox is related to the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox)

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ck2
btw 5 out of 6 numbers awards $1M under the "new" rules they have which makes
all 6 harder to win

last Saturday 25 people won that $1M prize

curious to see how many this time around tomorrow

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mesozoic
Anyone sophisticated enough to understand this method would be very unlikely
to play the lotto anyway.

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monochromatic
I dunno. The marginal utility of having a dollar (edit: apparently these
tickets cost two dollars, but that doesn't change my answer) in my pocket is
zero. Not _near_ zero, but identically zero. My life differs not even a little
bit based on whether I have that dollar or not.

The expected value of a lottery ticket is small but nonzero.

~~~
mikekchar
Obviously a moot point - you can do what you want with your money, but I think
your reasoning is flawed.

According to some replies in this thread, there are 292 million combinations.
If the Powerball is played once a week, then your expected wait time for
picking the winning number is 5.6 million years.

Now let's take a line of you and your heirs for the next 5.6 million years. To
say that being short 2 dollars on something will not make a life changing
difference in that time frame is naive. Anyone who has lived in poverty will
be able to relate to this.

In fact, I will challenge you even further. For many people on this planet $2
US would be the difference between eating today and not. Having $2 can help
them decide to buy medicine for their ill child rather than food. Or a
mosquito net that will save their life rather than food.

You only think the marginal utility of having $2 is zero because you are so
rich that you choose to discard your money without considering if there is
something better you could do with it. Sure, it may not make a big difference
to you, but the value is nonzero.

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rdtsc
Yes for someone in Africa that $2 pays for a day's meal or more.
monochromatic's $2 is not ending up in Africa perhaps. Their $2 is going
towards seeing Star Wars in the movie theater. They'll add it to another $17.
(I am using a metaphore here, don't know gp personally this is just tongue-in-
cheek). Or maybe monochromatic also likes playing the lottery. It gives him an
immense rush buying the ticket and selecting numbers and then watching how
they are picked. It is even better than Star Wars. So it makes sense to spend
it on lottery just like they might spent it on movies. They get entertaintment
value out of it.

Lottery is based on giving people false hope and that bit of adrenaline rush.
That short lived fantasy where they imagine what they'd do with the winnings.
That costs $2. It is cheaper than a McDonalds' meal. People will pay a lot for
hope, fantasy and dreams. Some can't control themselves and will spend the
money on that instead of food for their children. But many won't either. A bit
like booz. Some will become alcoholics and end up on street some will keep
driking a beer with dinner for many years and be fine.

