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> Of course, this will only work if you buy many tickets; buying one or two, you're unlikely to win anything at all. That's the important part here. You can a
by soneil 7y ago
> Of course, this will only work if you buy many tickets; buying one or two, you're unlikely to win anything at all.
That's the important part here. You can always win the lottery if you can buy enough tickets. To match all (n) numbers, you need to buy one ticket for every possible combination. To match (n-1), you need to buy a lot less.
But in a normal game, the cost of doing so is more than the payout. So if I have a dollar-game "guess a number between one and ten", and you can win $6 - it's not worth buying ten tickets, even if it guarantees you a win. But if I say "one day only, double the winnings!" - now $10 guarantees you $12 back.
The odds don't change, just the profitability of them.
- eridius 7y agoIn a normal lottery, if the pot gets large enough, even with the normal rules the "expected payout" of a ticket becomes higher than its list price. It's just that the chances of actually winning are so astronomically low that you'd have to be Jeff Bezos to stand a good chance of winning your bet (i.e. being able to buy enough tickets such that your chances of winning are worth the play, and then especially being able to absorb the loss when you lose anyway because it's still random). What's interesting with the rolldown mechanism is not just that the "expected payout" of a ticket becomes worth more than its price, but that the number of winners is such that you can actually reasonably expect to turn a profit by buying a modest number of tickets.