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Lottery Simulator (2023)
- airstrike 2y agoNow I just need to scrape the data on all major lotteries worldwide, plop them all into the simulator, make some assumptions about exchange rates and figure out where in the world I should bet on the lottery to get the best payout!
- ISL 2y agoNo need to simulate. It is generally straightforward to compute the odds directly from the rules.
- airstrike 2y agoFor sure, but not as fun to watch!
- jamesfinlayson 2y agoAustralia's Saturday Lotto is one of the better ones I believe (1 in 6,000,000 or so I think).
- itake 2y agothe expected value of each ticket is negative, but going from 0 tickets to 1 ticket, increases your chances of a big win by infinity. Going from 1 to n tickets, isn’t necessarily wise
- caseyy 2y agoEstimated monetary value might be a wiser metric to use :) Going by the calculator, EMV of going from buying 0 tickets to 1 is -$1.85 for Mega Millions, same as going from n to n+1; n >= 0. The first ticket is the first one you lose with, statistically.
- BizarroLand 2y agoI think the saying goes buying a lottery ticket only marginally increases your chance of winning.
- BigParm 2y agoYour chances were 0, you buy a ticket, and now your chances are x. Where x is not infinitely greater than 0, it's x greater than 0. Pretty sure your proposition implies that 2 tickets provide the same odds as one ticket (2 infinity vs 1 infinity). I haven't gotten into the discrete math in many years. If you're right do you mind explaining please? I can intuit what you're getting at. 0 odds * inf < (odds with one ticket). Is that a decent description?
- web007 2y agoOdds for N tickets as odd(N): odd(0) = 0 odd(1) = X, so odd(1) / odd(0) = +Inf increase in odds of winning vs 0 odd(2) = 2X, so odd(2) / odd(1) = 2x increase in odds of winning vs 1
- ff317 2y agoThat's kind of how I look at it, in practice. I get the mathematical reality that buying lotto tickets is a financial waste. However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a definite 0% chance I'll ever win the big prize. Whereas if I play at all, at least there's a chance, however remote, of a quite life-changing positive event happening. So, therefore, it makes sense to put a very small amount of totally throw-away income into big-prize lotto tickets, just so you're in the game at all. Based on this kind of thinking, my personal rules are: never spend more than 0.1% of take-home pay per time-period buying tickets, and only buy big-prize lotto tickets that have potentially-life-changing payouts.
- seagullriffic 2y agoThis is almost exactly how I think about it too - a good repeatable mental model is "infinite upside / near-zero downside". These massively asymmetric choices occur elsewhere in life, e.g. "asking them out on a date"; "asking for a raise", and are good to look out for.
- cwillu 2y agoDunno, seems wild to compare positive-but-still-unlikely ev things with straight up negative ev things like gambling.
- avidiax 2y agoThere's a near-zero possibility that the next potato chip in the bag has been laced with cyanide. But if you never eat any potato chips, there's a definite 0% chance that you'll die of cyanide-laced potato chips. This kind of thinking never holds up when it's a small chance of a horrible outcome.
- ryanjshaw 2y agoHow many potato chip killers have there been? How many lottery winners?
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- petesergeant 2y agoIn the real world, there's a non-zero chance that someone purchased a ticket on your behalf without you knowing, so you're never quite at 0
- GrantMoyer 2y agoOn the other hand, if I don't buy a lottery ticket, I have no chance to waste my money on the lottery, but if I do buy a ticket, the odds of wasting money are infinitely higher.
- nine_k 2y agoTo believe that you take a chance and you suddenly get the prize, despite statistics, is to believe that you're special. Maybe some people try such things to return the warm feeling of the early pre-school years.
- TheDong 2y agoThis is nonsense if it's meant to be interpreted as anything but a joke, or as a way to maximize your own personal fun. If you send me $20k of bitcoin and a UUID, I will run 'crypto.randomUUID()', and if I get the same UUID as you I'll send back $40k. If you don't send me any money, you have 0% chance of winning, but if you do send me $20k, you have a mere 1 in 2^122 chance of winning, an infinite increase in your chance of winning, so surely it is rational to do so. If you truly believe what you just wrote, I'll await my $20k.
- r0fl 2y agoI like that logic But does that mean you only buy 1 lottery ever in life or one each lottery?
- itake 2y agoJust when the numbers get big :)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ldbooth 2y agoVery cool visualization. This will save me a few bucks next time I think about playing.
- Aeolun 2y agoI think this lottery simulator is a scam. I played a hundred thousand games and never made my money back.
- zzanz 2y agoI used to work at a lotto counter in my towns supermarket. When I started I noticed alot of older regular buyers, a weekly lotto purchase like the daily newspaper. However, as the younger generation started bringing in kids I didn't see this habit, instead just an occasional purchase for a birthday gift or rolling the dice because the jackpots gotten big enough (funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest). Overall I would consider lotto small next to the scratch cards (our countries version at least). I have never seen a more predatory marketing strategy, and completely swept under the rug next to lotto being berated with anti-gambling campaigning. To be fair, lotto is bad, but scratch cards are much, much worse. A memory that stuck for me was a customer blowing well over $100 bucks on scratchcards over 20 minutes, just pulling over and over, then getting card declined at the grocery checkouts.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago> funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest Not really? The odds of winning are the same regardless, because you need to match every number to get a jackpot. Really, there is just an increased chance of splitting a jackpot with another person when the prize gets really large, since more tickets are generally sold. But I imagine EV of a lottery ticket with a $1B jackpot is still higher than the same lottery ticket when the jackpot is $100M.
- function_seven 2y agoThere’s a balance between jackpot size and a given drawing’s popularity for sure. There are also bad number choices and good number choices. 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point! To a lesser degree, choosing numbers under 31, or under 12, will put you in a collision space with other players who like to choose birthdays. Just use the random pick and don’t think about it. If you do win the jackpot, you have higher odds of being the only one.
- deleted 2y ago
- eig 2y agoCool visualization! It would've been nice to not assume only one lottery winner. People tend to pick numbers that are meaningful for them: birthdays, favorite numbers, lucky numbers. Thus it actually significantly increases your EV if you pick unusual numbers, which is not reflected here.
- hammock 2y agoSo, for Mega Millions: For 1-70: Consider numbers above 31 (days of month) For 1-25: Similarly, numbers above 12 might be less common (months of year) What other numbers above 31 would you want to avoid? 33, 44, 50, 69, 70? And you might want to avoid sequences as well.
- shriracha 2y agoHi! I made this tool. I saw it had way more traffic than usual and then realized it was from HN, very cool! Would love to hear any feedback. I've been super interested in how well-designed web apps and visualizations can communicate things like probability, which I think is very hard to intuit for many of us. The most surprising thing I learned from the tool was just how bad your payouts usually were even if you cut the pool of numbers to pick from in half (by using the "Custom" option).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- is_true 2y agowow, it's really good and the rest of your site is even better
- BitwiseFool 2y agoI would very much like to see an even faster "turbo" option because even though the current max speed of 1,000 tickets a second really drives home the point of how long it would take to actually win, I still want to see the simulation hit the jackpot a few times.
- Vullun 2y agoI noticed that when you select pick random numbers, it only picks it once. Can we run the simulation where it picks new numbers every time? I would love to see if that would make an impact on the odds.
- sfilmeyer 2y ago>I would love to see if that would make an impact on the odds. It won't make an impact on the odds of your tickets coming up as winners, unless they have a bug in their simulation. In the real world the probability of single versus multiple jackpot winners might vary with number choices, but they've already said they're assuming a single jackpot winner.
- earle_wa 2y ago
- fragmede 2y agoOn the subject of winning the lottery, the story that goes untold is of the MIT crew that gamed Massachusetts' Cash Windfall circa 2007. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit-students-gamed-the-lottery/470349/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit... There's a movie out starring Walter White, of the Selbees side, called Jerry and Marge Go Large, but which talks about the story, but portrays the MIT kids poorly for dramatic effect.
- fsckboy 2y agohttps://archive.is/G5Ctz https://archive.is/G5Ctz
- islewis 2y agoCan someone explain to me how the EV can be so incredibly low? I know the answer is because people will buy the tickets no matter what, but even compared to other losing games the lottery comes away looking like an absolute bandit. A run on the simulation (n=1000000) comes back with -92% EV. It looks like -10% [1] is a rough estimate for slot machine EV, which I would ballpark into the same game genre (-EV, no skill entertainment) as the lottery. What accounts for this payout discrepancy in what I would consider similar games? On that train of thought, what prevents a new lottery from coming in and offering a _generous_ -50% lottery, offering ~5x as much money as before? [1]* https://www.888casino.com/blog/expected-value https://www.888casino.com/blog/expected-value
- elseweather 2y agoIn the US at least they're a state monopoly
- serf 2y ago>On that train of thought, what prevents a new lottery from coming in and offering a _generous_ -50% lottery, offering ~5x as much money as before? federal-level gambling syndicate isn't something that a private party can easily jump into. so the answer is : a mix of 'grandfather'd-in' and protectionism, if we're talking U.S. here.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cataflam 2y agoBecause you shouldn't use the simulator to calculate the EV, or said differently your n=1000000 is too small. Assuming you used the first lottery example (Mega Millions), the EV is easy to calculate directly and is -$0.66/ticket, ie -33% The jackpot is a whole $1 of that EV! Without it, the EV is -$1.75/ticket, ie -87%, which is closer to what you got in the simulation.
- thephyber 2y agoExactly. In short, the simulator doesn’t buy enough ticket-draws to approach the Law of Large Numbers. But that’s also a feature of the lottery — most people overestimate their ability to win or underestimate how many lifetimes of consistent play is required to statistically win a jackpot.
- hellojesus 2y agoDoes this have any way of simulating multiple plays per draw? I'm curious what happens to EV when you buy X tickets per draw instead of just 1. And for both circumstances: (a) ensure all X tickets are unique and (b) random entries with replacement.
- ISL 2y agoUnless you're buying a meaningful fraction of tickets, the EV/ticket will be similar to uncorrelated tickets. If you're buying all the tickets, well, the math is real easy. (and occasionally profitable, see 1992 in Virginia)
- russellbeattie 2y agoHumans are so weird... No matter how simple you make a slot machine, for some reason it's still compelling to play. On one of my runs, I won $1 million which put my numbers in the green for a while before slowly going into the red again. That's going to legitimately brighten the rest of my day.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tomthe 2y agoHN user ggerganov made a similar tool with real historical numbers from Bulgaria: https://lottery-check.ggerganov.com/ https://lottery-check.ggerganov.com/
- rootusrootus 2y agoI got lucky. Won a million bucks early in the simulation and it took a while before the EV was negative again. Should have stopped right after winning a million, duh.
- hidelooktropic 2y agoLooks a lot like https://www.adamgrant.info/heres-1m-dollars-try-to-win-the-lottery https://www.adamgrant.info/heres-1m-dollars-try-to-win-the-l...
- kristopolous 2y agoFor years whenever I see lottery numbers announced I first scrawl some guesses on a piece of paper, trying to summon all divine power I can muster. I think I once guessed 2 of them . This way I get all the thrill of the game with none of the cost.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoI could never do that. Imagine the devastation of getting all of them right.
- hitthejackpot 2y ago[dead]
- efalcao 2y agoHit a million dollar ticket! BRB going to buy lottery tickets!
- jackcheng1126 2y agoThe tool has a maximum speed of 1000 tickets per second, which may not be fast enough for some users. Hopefully the author will consider adding a 'turbo' option to make the simulation faster so we can get more results in less time.
- dostick 2y agoWhat would be super interesting is to collect all different lotteries from different countries and regions, and run simulations to find which ones are most lucrative. And you can’t treat know how good is your local lottery in comparison.
- camjohnson26 2y agoThere was a Romanian economist who was able to exploit several lotteries around the world. He essentially bought every combination to lotteries where the payout was higher than the cost. Logistical nightmare. https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times
- foragerdev 2y agoSo, you will lose 1.84$ on each ticket you buy.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoCan we add quantum suicide to this simulation? This is where you entangle your mortal soul to the lottery outcome and are only allowed to survive if you win. This is a cheat code for the parallel universe crowd.
- PaywallBuster 2y agoEarnings $311,509,052 over 16,680,000 tickets Average: $18.68 per ticket
- baggachipz 2y agoI'm the smarmy prick who, when somebody says they bought a lottery ticket, I say "Give me the same amount you paid for that lottery ticket, and if you win I'll double your winnings." Them: "there's no way you could afford to pay me!" Me: "I won't have to."
- gosub100 2y agoNot sure if anyone linked it here, but my favorite simulator was a 2D grid, with about 50 or so units per side. The computer picks 3 squares, you pick 3 squares. The XxY unit grid was set up such that if you picked the same 3 squares as the computer, it was the same odds as winning Powerball. Seeing how hard it was to even get 1 square really drove home the odds. I also did a similar calculation by estimating the area of millions of quarters (enough to represent the 1/N chance to win) and thought "ok, if I launched a rubber ball randomly at high velocity in this huge room, I would win if it landed on one exact quarter that I picked in advance. When I saw it like that, I realized there's no way.
- navark 2y agoI won! That's it, the lottery is worth playing if only I can repeat this performance IRL. I won the $340,000,000 Powerball Grand Prize after buying 11,651,310 $2 tickets leaving me with a grand total of $319,781,766 in earnings ($27.45 per ticket).
- FireBeyond 2y agoInteresting. You got it at 11.6M tickets... I got it at 10,847,948.
- thefoyer 2y agoThis is exactly why I don't play the lottery
- Idiot211 2y agoAny chance of multiple bonus numbers like the Euromillions offers?
- touristtam 2y agoYes I was interested to see how different the simulation would be.