Powerball

Getting together tonight with about 15-20 college friends. We've put the over/under on number of lotto tickets bought with a BAC of 0.13 or higher at 263.5. I'll take the over.

 

I've already got my first couple of text messages ready to send after I win tonight.

First is "I QUIT"
Second is a group message to a bunch of my friends "Meet me at the bar.....leave your wallets at home"

 

Thought your first act would be to wire $10,000 to buy a dog.

 

This table lists the probabilities of having at least one winner under various sales levels:

# Tickets (millions) Prob(Winner)
100 0.2898
200 0.4956
300 0.6418
400 0.7456
500 0.8193
600 0.8717

So even if there were twice as many tickets as possible numbers* purchased, there'd be more than a 10% chance that not a single one of them would be a winner.

*There are a bit more than 292.2 million numbers that are possible.

 

Nope. Already got that taken care of.

 

Yep. That's the number I heard too.

 

If you have Excel (or any other spreadsheet for that matter) it's easy to calculate ...

There are 69 main numbers, from which 5 will be drawn. In Excel, the formula is =COMBIN(69,5). The result tells you that there are 11,238,513 possible combinations of these 69 numbers.

Then, you multiply that value by 26, the number of possible Powerball numbers. You come up with 292,201,338.

 

One of our younger reporters was tasked with the duty of a Powerball story where she would have to find people to talk too. She's new to the market and asked me where to go.

Me: Go to the most economically downtrodden parts of town and you'll see the long lines, often with people who don't have jobs to go to. Talk to them. They're dreamers, not planners, and think they may actually have a shot at winning.

That being said, sure, I'll buy one today.

 

So she just stayed put and interviewed people around the newspaper office?

 

That means, with a payout approaching $500 million, that there's probably a consortium of rich folks who have gotten together to pool their money and buy up every possible combination.
Low man on the totem pole has to go to the convenience store and wait for the clerk to punch in the numbers.

 

I'd have to be a lot higher than $500m, since they'd have to pay taxes on it. So $500m earned isn't $500m take home. They'd also have to factor in the fact that there's a chance they'd have to split their winnings, and any split would guarantee a loss of money. I don't know how high it would have to be before the expected value of all the numbers is > the cost, given taxes, and the possibility of a split purse. And of course there's just the damn hassle of it all, too.

 

I'm hoping you're being facetious.