this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Give me one very good month of buying lottery tickets and I can get there. I swear I can get there..
Clearly the problem is that you're not buying enough lottery tickets
I do wonder about that. Odds of winning the Powerball are 1 in 292.2 million. So theoretically if you spent $292 million on a $1B powerball payout (and no one else won), you be guaranteed to win and should come out well ahead because you’d have other tickets that would win downstream amounts. It’s just having that initial capital and surprised we haven’t seen someone try to invest that amount.
The issue is that multiple winners split the jackpots, which is why playing common numbers like dates (birthdays) is a terrible strategy since so many people play those.
When the Powerball exceeds the value of being able to purchase all of the numbers it is common that the number of tickets sold more than doubles the Total number of numbers which statistically guarantees multiple winners. Almost nobody wins those billion dollar jackpots by themselves.