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Worse: buying a ticket generally decreases your expected net lottery winnings, as the expected value of a lottery ticket is almost always lower than its purchas
by jasomill 3y ago
Worse: buying a ticket generally decreases your expected net lottery winnings, as the expected value of a lottery ticket is almost always lower than its purchase price.
The only likely exceptions I'm aware of that don't require either cheating or inside information are atypically large progressive jackpots without commensurate increases in ticket sales (unlikely exceptions include finding exploitable patterns in inadequately randomized draws before they're otherwise brought to the attention of lottery operators).
For the record, my own personal net lottery winnings total nearly $400, consisting almost entirely of gifts and winning scratch-offs I've picked up off the ground (slightly more than $400 in winnings less $5–10 I've spent buying three or four tickets in my life).
- dhosek 3y agoI buy one lottery ticket a year, on my birthday. A lotto quick-pick. Fantasizing about what I’d do with the jackpot for a couple days is worth the buck a year. My total winnings in a lifetime is $2. There was some group that determined that it was possible to get a return of slightly over 1.0 on lottery tickets (I forget all the parameters, although the one I remember was playing numbers only greater than 31 to reduce the odds of sharing the jackpot with people who play birthdays/anniversaries/etc) and the return time to get slightly over 1.0 was several thousand years (this is all based on memories that are 30ish years old, so I may have some details wrong).