The Powerball lottery jackpot, which now stands at $20 million, is tough to win — and sometimes, nobody wins it.
It’s incredibly hard to match all six numbers drawn for the game. To get an idea of just how long the odds are, software engineer Andrew Arrow built a clever little program that randomly generates six lottery numbers (including, naturally, a powerball), and then spits out an infinite set of random guesses, counting how many matches the computer finds.
In the time it took us to write this post, the applet made 5,467 guesses and never matched more than two winning numbers on the same ticket.
Of course, the trick of playing the lottery is that the belief you might win the jackpot can be neurobiologically as satisfying as actually winning. In which case the lottery isn’t a tax on people who are bad at math; it’s cheap entertainment.
(HT: Jennifer Godwin)
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. You can also watch it on 
The odds of getting 5 + powerball are one in (59 choose 5) * 39, or one in 195,249,054. That’s two thirds of the population of the US. If anything it should be a surprise that the jackpot gets hit as often as it does.
You can be 100% sure you won’t have to “split the pot” (don’t throw me in that briar patch!!) by not purchasing a ticket, too, but it doesn’t improve your chances of winning anything.
The odds of any six numbers winning are the same as any other six numbers. Other than worrying about splitting with others who pick dates (which definitely affects your expected value), there’s no reason not to just play these numbers: 1-2-3-4-5-6. Easy to remember, but you just *know* those numbers will never come up. Neither will the numbers you play instead.
the jackpot is at 20 million? that means someone just did the impossible, in your eyes,, and won!!
The drawing works like this:
1. They pick 5 balls out of 59 circulating in a tank.
2. They pick 1 ball out of 39 in a separate tank.
They say the odds of winning it all are 1 in 195,249,054 and the odds of winning $200k are 1 in 5,138,133. You win $200k if you get all 5 of the first draw but not the 1 of the second draw.
Somebody always wins. It may take months, but the jackpot keeps rolling over, and eventually somebody wins it. Believing you can win is the same as believing that if you go in the ocean you’ll be attacked by a shark. It is a belief in destiny.
But pretending that playing the lottery is a complete waste of time and money is like saying humans aren’t the natural prey of the shark. When we’re in the water, we are.
Isn’t there someone in a lawsuit against a lottery about the lottery not publishing the amount of losing tickets versus winning tickets? That showing the odds is not really true against the actual amount of tickets sold?
My question is if the multistate lotteries are some how biased against southeastern states or is it just that more people spend more money in mid-west states etc which generates more winners in those locations?
how about a lottery bailout?- just have the government put up $350 billion for a prize, and see how many people buy tix- not much different or unethical than giving it to bank of america so they can buy more banks and become even too-bigger-to-fail