>"buy lottery tickets with your money and time with the hope to win 10k", it just can't compete. The real lottery requires only money and offers a bigger reward

>"buy lottery tickets with your money and time with the hope to win 10k", it just can't compete. The real lottery requires only money and offers a bigger reward without effort. I mean the analogy doesn't really work because the calculation of the risk has to take into account number of people competing for prize. Furthermore if you are going to do the lottery you only have chance to buy ticket, if you are going to compete for history prize you also have the importance of the idea you will demonstrate. Obviously people are apt to think their own ideas are really brilliant but that evaluation would go into deciding if it was useful to pursue that path. But I would think winning this kind of thing might actually be more important not to be a historian but as a CV brightening bit for a job in a more lucrative field also requiring intellectual ability and analytical rigor.