6 ms·

How to play Powerball so you don’t have to share the jackpot

38 points by b_emery 11y ago

kybernetikos 11y ago
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?
- dkokelley 11y ago
  I'm wondering the same thing. I'd guess it's the risk of having too many winners coupled with the fact that any entity with that much cash to "invest" has regulations preventing them from investing in a lottery. (There's also the hassle of the logistics of printing and storing that many tickets.)
  - ipince 11y ago
    Well.. We could set up an organized network where if you sign up, you will be assigned some numbers to play, and you'll take home a part of the prize, guaranteed. Your share is in proportion to your investment. That way, you don't need 292m to take the prize, and any average Joe can decide to invest, say $100, and still come out positive. Of course, it can very well become an organizational nightmare :-) Edit: typo.
    - kybernetikos 11y ago
      Anything where the helpers keep the tickets is a bad idea. As I understand it, laws prevent you from selling an interest in gambling to others, so even with a contract, you wouldn't be able to enforce that the winners hand over the money.
- corin_ 11y ago
  Without having the numbers or doing the maths, I'd guess that if you include the odds of another person or people also winning the EV would drop below 100% return.
- Jemaclus 11y ago
  That only works if there can be only one winner. If you spend $250Mto win $292M, that seems like a sure bet. But someone else wins too, then you only won $146 million, so you actually lost $104M. I'm skeptical that the math works out, even if you're the only winner, though. The lottery is pretty much designed so that the expected value (EV) of a ticket is much, much lower than what you pay for it. They always make more money than you win.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kybernetikos 11y ago
    In my calculation I took into account the risk of sharing the prize, although I had to make assumptions on how many other people were playing (you can get a sense of how many other people there are playing by how much the jackpot increases between draws). Unless my guess is wrong, I think it still works out even with sharing unless you happen to buy every ticket on the same draw that other people have had the same idea.
- simonw 11y ago
  Someone tried it in Ireland in the 1990s: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/how-to-make-a-killing-on-the-lottery-1322272.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/how-to-make-a-killing-on-t... Another attempt in Australia in 1992: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million...
- protomyth 11y ago
  Physics and how much cash you would need to carry. 5 ticket combos per form and there are comb(69, 5) x 26 or 292,201,338 possible combinations meaning you would need to fill out 58,440,268 powerball forms (the last with only 3 combos on it). At this point acquiring 58+ million forms is going to be a bit of a problem, followed by building the machine to fill out all the forms, and finally having to buy each set of tickets for $10 each (except, of course, the last form costing $6). I am pretty sure going from place to place as they run out of ticket rolls will also make it a bit difficult.
  - funkyy 11y ago
    Dont you think if you would spend this kind of money you could go straight to the lottery and get them to manage this? At worst you could get your own lottery shop, hire few folks and just print the tickets. If you have this kind of money, surely you can hire few helpers.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Well, given the amount of tickets, I doubt it. Let's just say you found out nobody won on Saturday night and started your plan right then. It takes about 10 seconds to slide the card in and get a ticket, but let's be generous and say you can do a 5 number card every second. That's 58,440,268 seconds or 676 days 9 hours 24 minutes 28 seconds which is a bit beyond the limited window of Saturday night to Wednesday night. This does not count consumables, consumable reloading, or possible break down of the machine. It would take well over 200+ machines to make the deadline at 1 per second or 2,000+ machines for 10 seconds per ticket.
    - irishcoffee 11y ago
      Yes, you can do this.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        How can I buy 292,201,338 tickets?
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  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-lottery/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball...
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    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)
    - bryanlarsen 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        So according to the maths it sucks to be the person who wins $20 million?
  - kybernetikos 11y ago
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  Game Theory -- if other people know about this, they will attempt; but knowing they know means they know you know, which leads to a prisoners dilemma: if you both play, you lose, but if just ones does, that one wins.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    Reality: the people playing more frequently played numbers don't have a firm enough grasp of statistics to be able to calculate their plays in a game theory scenario.
    - mmanfrin 11y ago
      We're talking about a scenario that involves buying all tickets when the odds are favorable for a greater return than investment in to lotto tickets. So no, the people playing this game would not have a firm grasp on statistics; they'd most likely have a very strong one.
- asift 11y ago
  1. Lump sum reduction 2. Taxes 3. Split prize risk 4. Logistics
- tempestn 11y ago
  I think logistics and risk the main reasons. On average you can expect the jackpot to be split 3-4 ways, and the lump sum payout will only be ~900M. I'm not sure what the other prizes add up to, but obviously they're going to be significantly less than the jackpot. So given that it would cost almost $600M to buy all the combinations, it is very possible that you could end up with a loss in the tens of millions, if not more. It's not the most likely result, but it would certainly be a consideration. The bigger issue though is how much it would cost to buy and redeem ~300 million tickets. Since you're choosing your numbers, someone is going to have to physically type in each set of numbers at sale. So at a minimum it's going to take like 5 seconds per set just to produce them. Or about 70 years, working continuously for 16 hours a day. Obviously you wouldn't do it all yourself, but even assuming retailers were willing to just continuously produce tickets for you all waking hours, you would need 4000 people working in parallel, 16 hours a day, to get the tickets printed in under a week. And that's just the time to physically type in the numbers. They're also each going to need to store and transport the thousands of tickets. Then you have to redeem them, a process which would likely take longer. So as a rough estimate, say 8000 person-days (8-hour days) overall. Plus overhead for bookkeeping, management, etc. Even so, that would only cost on the order of single millions; a rounding error compared to the jackpot. But can you even find thousands of people willing and able to do this job? They would have to be relatively trustworthy as well. Given the risk, no one is going to lend you the money to do this. So you would need access to half a billion dollars. I imagine most people with those resources have better things to do with their time. (Although if the draw were in a few months, maybe Donald Trump would have a go.)
ck2 11y ago
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
dkokelley 11y ago
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?
- ck2 11y ago
  $1.5B is only if you take the payments. It's something like $900 million lump sum.
  - dkokelley 11y ago
    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.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - pbreit 11y ago
    Minus taxes.
- MatthaeusHarris 11y ago
  Unfortunately, yes. Present value of a future annuity (taking the lump sum now cuts the jackpot by quite a bit), and taxes. For ballpark calculations, I assume that each is going to cut the advertised jackpot in half. So for a $1.5 billion jackpot, your expected return is going to be a around $375 million (plus every single other prize, but that just adds about $20 million to the total), assuming no other winners. Yes, your strategy will work, but not until the jackpot reaches even more ludicrous heights.
zappo2938 11y ago
Everyone Is Freaking Out About The $1.5 Billion Powerball, And The Stats Agree [1] [1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball-lottery/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball...
mesozoic 11y ago
Anyone sophisticated enough to understand this method would be very unlikely to play the lotto anyway.
- kybernetikos 11y ago
  I play lotteries when under some simple assumptions I believe the EV to be in my favour - usually when there have been many rollovers. Taking a MWI view, I consider it to be a way of transferring money to other universe versions of myself, and when you have a good EV, that represents a cheap inter-universe transfer rate.
- monochromatic 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
tunesmith 11y ago
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. :-)
- dkokelley 11y ago
  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. :)
mleonhard 11y ago
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.
brianpgordon 11y ago
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
tempestn 11y ago
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.
me_again 11y ago
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.
- ethbro 11y ago
  Unfortunately, a bit late for this scheme this time, non? The prize being cumulative and all.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  Isn't this the same as running a lottery, but outsourcing the winning-number-generation?
  - me_again 11y ago
    Heavens, no. That would be gambling. This is insurance. Entirely different.

38 points by b_emery 11y ago

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?

dkokelley 11y ago
I'm wondering the same thing. I'd guess it's the risk of having too many winners coupled with the fact that any entity with that much cash to "invest" has regulations preventing them from investing in a lottery. (There's also the hassle of the logistics of printing and storing that many tickets.)
- ipince 11y ago
  Well.. We could set up an organized network where if you sign up, you will be assigned some numbers to play, and you'll take home a part of the prize, guaranteed. Your share is in proportion to your investment. That way, you don't need 292m to take the prize, and any average Joe can decide to invest, say $100, and still come out positive. Of course, it can very well become an organizational nightmare :-) Edit: typo.
  - kybernetikos 11y ago
    Anything where the helpers keep the tickets is a bad idea. As I understand it, laws prevent you from selling an interest in gambling to others, so even with a contract, you wouldn't be able to enforce that the winners hand over the money.
corin_ 11y ago
Without having the numbers or doing the maths, I'd guess that if you include the odds of another person or people also winning the EV would drop below 100% return.
Jemaclus 11y ago
That only works if there can be only one winner. If you spend $250Mto win $292M, that seems like a sure bet. But someone else wins too, then you only won $146 million, so you actually lost $104M. I'm skeptical that the math works out, even if you're the only winner, though. The lottery is pretty much designed so that the expected value (EV) of a ticket is much, much lower than what you pay for it. They always make more money than you win.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kybernetikos 11y ago
  In my calculation I took into account the risk of sharing the prize, although I had to make assumptions on how many other people were playing (you can get a sense of how many other people there are playing by how much the jackpot increases between draws). Unless my guess is wrong, I think it still works out even with sharing unless you happen to buy every ticket on the same draw that other people have had the same idea.
simonw 11y ago
Someone tried it in Ireland in the 1990s: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/how-to-make-a-killing-on-the-lottery-1322272.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/how-to-make-a-killing-on-t... Another attempt in Australia in 1992: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million...
protomyth 11y ago
Physics and how much cash you would need to carry. 5 ticket combos per form and there are comb(69, 5) x 26 or 292,201,338 possible combinations meaning you would need to fill out 58,440,268 powerball forms (the last with only 3 combos on it). At this point acquiring 58+ million forms is going to be a bit of a problem, followed by building the machine to fill out all the forms, and finally having to buy each set of tickets for $10 each (except, of course, the last form costing $6). I am pretty sure going from place to place as they run out of ticket rolls will also make it a bit difficult.
- funkyy 11y ago
  Dont you think if you would spend this kind of money you could go straight to the lottery and get them to manage this? At worst you could get your own lottery shop, hire few folks and just print the tickets. If you have this kind of money, surely you can hire few helpers.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Well, given the amount of tickets, I doubt it. Let's just say you found out nobody won on Saturday night and started your plan right then. It takes about 10 seconds to slide the card in and get a ticket, but let's be generous and say you can do a 5 number card every second. That's 58,440,268 seconds or 676 days 9 hours 24 minutes 28 seconds which is a bit beyond the limited window of Saturday night to Wednesday night. This does not count consumables, consumable reloading, or possible break down of the machine. It would take well over 200+ machines to make the deadline at 1 per second or 2,000+ machines for 10 seconds per ticket.
  - irishcoffee 11y ago
    Yes, you can do this.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      How can I buy 292,201,338 tickets?
bryanlarsen 11y ago
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-lottery/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball...
- maxerickson 11y ago
  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)
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      So according to the maths it sucks to be the person who wins $20 million?
- kybernetikos 11y ago
mmanfrin 11y ago
Game Theory -- if other people know about this, they will attempt; but knowing they know means they know you know, which leads to a prisoners dilemma: if you both play, you lose, but if just ones does, that one wins.
- ethbro 11y ago
  Reality: the people playing more frequently played numbers don't have a firm enough grasp of statistics to be able to calculate their plays in a game theory scenario.
  - mmanfrin 11y ago
    We're talking about a scenario that involves buying all tickets when the odds are favorable for a greater return than investment in to lotto tickets. So no, the people playing this game would not have a firm grasp on statistics; they'd most likely have a very strong one.
asift 11y ago
1. Lump sum reduction 2. Taxes 3. Split prize risk 4. Logistics
tempestn 11y ago
I think logistics and risk the main reasons. On average you can expect the jackpot to be split 3-4 ways, and the lump sum payout will only be ~900M. I'm not sure what the other prizes add up to, but obviously they're going to be significantly less than the jackpot. So given that it would cost almost $600M to buy all the combinations, it is very possible that you could end up with a loss in the tens of millions, if not more. It's not the most likely result, but it would certainly be a consideration. The bigger issue though is how much it would cost to buy and redeem ~300 million tickets. Since you're choosing your numbers, someone is going to have to physically type in each set of numbers at sale. So at a minimum it's going to take like 5 seconds per set just to produce them. Or about 70 years, working continuously for 16 hours a day. Obviously you wouldn't do it all yourself, but even assuming retailers were willing to just continuously produce tickets for you all waking hours, you would need 4000 people working in parallel, 16 hours a day, to get the tickets printed in under a week. And that's just the time to physically type in the numbers. They're also each going to need to store and transport the thousands of tickets. Then you have to redeem them, a process which would likely take longer. So as a rough estimate, say 8000 person-days (8-hour days) overall. Plus overhead for bookkeeping, management, etc. Even so, that would only cost on the order of single millions; a rounding error compared to the jackpot. But can you even find thousands of people willing and able to do this job? They would have to be relatively trustworthy as well. Given the risk, no one is going to lend you the money to do this. So you would need access to half a billion dollars. I imagine most people with those resources have better things to do with their time. (Although if the draw were in a few months, maybe Donald Trump would have a go.)

ck2 11y ago

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

dkokelley 11y ago

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?

ck2 11y ago
$1.5B is only if you take the payments. It's something like $900 million lump sum.
- dkokelley 11y ago
  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.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- pbreit 11y ago
  Minus taxes.
MatthaeusHarris 11y ago
Unfortunately, yes. Present value of a future annuity (taking the lump sum now cuts the jackpot by quite a bit), and taxes. For ballpark calculations, I assume that each is going to cut the advertised jackpot in half. So for a $1.5 billion jackpot, your expected return is going to be a around $375 million (plus every single other prize, but that just adds about $20 million to the total), assuming no other winners. Yes, your strategy will work, but not until the jackpot reaches even more ludicrous heights.

zappo2938 11y ago

Everyone Is Freaking Out About The $1.5 Billion Powerball, And The Stats Agree [1] [1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball-lottery/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-powerball...

mesozoic 11y ago

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

kybernetikos 11y ago
I play lotteries when under some simple assumptions I believe the EV to be in my favour - usually when there have been many rollovers. Taking a MWI view, I consider it to be a way of transferring money to other universe versions of myself, and when you have a good EV, that represents a cheap inter-universe transfer rate.
monochromatic 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

tunesmith 11y ago

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. :-)

dkokelley 11y ago
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. :)

mleonhard 11y ago

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.

brianpgordon 11y ago

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

tempestn 11y ago

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.

me_again 11y ago

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.

ethbro 11y ago
Unfortunately, a bit late for this scheme this time, non? The prize being cumulative and all.
pavel_lishin 11y ago
Isn't this the same as running a lottery, but outsourcing the winning-number-generation?
- me_again 11y ago
  Heavens, no. That would be gambling. This is insurance. Entirely different.