​Why You Should Never Play The Lottery

Why You Should Never Play The Lottery

I defy you to find anyone who has never fantasized about winning the lottery. The house! The travel! The help for loved ones and favorite charities! Someone to deliver a single, perfect piece of chocolate to your door every day! (OK, maybe that's just me.)Get more news about 菲律宾彩票包网平台,you can vist loto98.com

While most of us will never see that kind of money dumped in our laps, a select few lottery winners do actually get to realize their fantasy—and on Saturday night, someone could win the largest Powerball lottery ever, $700 million .One of the “luckiest” people in the nation is Richard Lustig, author of Learn How To Increase Your Chances of Winning the Lottery, who has won seven lottery grand prizes and perfected his strategy though trial and error. “When the lottery came to Florida, I was like everybody else: ‘Wow, buy lottery tickets, win a lot of money, retire, buy a big fancy yacht, whatever, blah, blah, blah,’” he said. “Like everybody else, I was running out and buying haphazardly, buying quick picks, I mean buying tickets with no plan, or no method, or whatever. Like everybody else, I was losing all the time.”

Then Lustig realized there had to be a way to increase his chances. Every time something worked, he’d write it down. Eventually, he had a “formula” that worked for him and others. His main tips--which don't all follow strict mathematical logic, and have been discounted by some as nonsense--for those playing lotteries are below:Of course, plenty of financial professionals say it's never worth it to play the lottery. Even though there's a lot to be gained, in general, playing Powerball is still a bad decision because you never get the full jackpot, and chances are you'll be splitting it, says Paul Dreyer, a mathematician for the RAND Corporation (who, for the record, fully disagrees with the logic of Lustig's method).

He broke down the probability this way: "There are pieces to the Powerball lottery, the major cash prize and the smaller prizes for matching some, but not all, of the numbers. When you add up the expected earnings just from the smaller prizes, it comes out to about $0.32 per ticket. That means that for every $2 ticket you play, for a ticket to be 'worth it' in the long term, the expected earnings from the big prize should be at least $1.68.

"The probability of winning the big prize is 1 in 292,201,338. The naive argument would be that once the jackpot gets above $473 million, you should buy a ticket because your expected winnings per ticket is greater than the $2 you spent on the ticket."

He adds that most people would think that playing for the $700 million jackpot is a "no brainer," but there are things to consider:

The $700M is a 30-year annuity. The cash now option is typically 60 to 70% of the jackpot. For the current jackpot it is $428.4M, about 61% of the annuity total.Everyone will be playing. For the sake of an example, if all 320 million people in the United States buy a single random ticket the probability that at least one person wins is about 66.6%. "That 'at least' part is key, though," Dreyer says. "The probability that exactly one person wins is 36.6%. That means that 45% of the time, if you win, you're splitting the jackpot with at least one other person. ... Presumably, the larger the prize, the more tickets are purchased by people, and the more likely you are to split the prize. It is a nasty spiral."

He adds: "However, I have no desire to be a lottery curmudgeon. If you have $2 available and buying that ticket lets you enjoy a momentary dream of your own private island, consider it a cost of entertainment. That statement is predicated on having the $2 available, which gets to the issue of lottery participants which participate in large numbers but may not have the disposable income to support it, namely the poor."