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Expected value on some jackpot lotteries does occasionally go over 1. For example, I did the math on Canada's 6/49 about 20 years ago. Whenever the jackpot
by bryanlarsen 3y ago
Expected value on some jackpot lotteries does occasionally go over 1. For example, I did the math on Canada's 6/49 about 20 years ago. Whenever the jackpot was over ~$30M, the expected payout was over 1. If you bought a ticket for every jackpot the expected payout was 0.5, the expected payout of any lottery without a jackpot was < 0.2 in hindsight. For $30M prizes the number of players and the odds of sharing a prize went up, but not enough to compensate.
It would have had to go well above $45M to make the "buy every number" strategy have expected value of > 1 since buying every number increases the expected people sharing the prize by 1.