Comment #2

LckyLary — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 03:55:16 GMT

You have not said how the numbers are picked; RNG or other algorithm?

Comment #1

ACPutz — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:53:15 GMT

Thanks Mediabrat - this is a cool idea.

Original Blog Entry: The "One In 1000" Project -- Introduction

mediabrat — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:35:26 GMT

A recent discussion on the Lottery Post forums centered around whether you could improve your odds of winning a lottery jackpot by buying more tickets. Long story short, it came down to semantics; it depended on how you defined the terms odds and chances and on how much weight you place on mathematics. The correct answer is: You do increase your chances and reduce your odds with each ticket you buy. (I prefer to replace increase and decrease with improve so that it's clear what's going on.) However, since the odds of a single play winning either the Mega Millions or Powerball jackpot are approximately 1 in 175 million -- or 0.00000057%; that's 57 one-hundred-millionths of one percent -- your odds improve so insignificantly that it soon becomes a question of how much money you're willing to spend on one drawing with little effect on your actual chances of winning.

During the course of the discussion a question was raised: If buying more tickets really does improve your odds, why don't you see people (or groups) with sufficient resources from purchasing enough tickets to reduce their personal odds to 1 in 1000? There are a few answers:

Logistics. Assuming a lottery terminal can print one ticket per second, it would take over 48 hours to print the approximately 175,000 tickets necessary to get the odds down to 1 in 1000. And that doesn't even include the amount of time needed to either run all those play cards through the terminal or program it to print off 175,000 tickets. It's improbable, maybe impossible, and maybe even illegal for one person to accomplish this on their own, and it's unlikely that you could assemble a group large enough to pull it off. Cost. It would cost $175,000 to buy your stack of Mega Millions tickets and $350,000 if you're playing Powerball, and that's assuming you don't add on the Megaplier/Power Play. Granted, the premise states that you have enough money to do this, but still, it seems a bit mad to drop that much coin on one drawing. And that doesn't even take into account... Math. Okay, so you've improved your odds from 1 in 175,000,000 to 1 in 1000. Sounds good, right? After all, your state's Pick 3 game has those odds of winning the top prize and people win that all the time. Not so fast. There's still a 99.9% chance that you will NOT win the jackpot! Man, that stinks! You spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying lottery tickets with only a 0.1% chance of hitting the big one? Ouch!

And that's where we come in. So it's still highly unlikely that you'll win a Mega Millions or Powerball jackpot even if you buy 175,000 tickets at once. But I got to thinking: If you could reduce your odds to 1 in 1000, how much money can you win on average? I was pretty good at math in high school, but I have no idea if it's possible to figure this out mathematically or where I would even start. So the other option is to actually do this and see what happens. Clearly I don't have the ability to accomplish this in the real world, but I do have the ability to simulate it. I'm a computer programmer, so I wrote a program that would generate 175,000 unique lines for each game and then check those numbers against the actual numbers drawn.

It would not be feasible to post all 175,000 lines for each drawing and the number of balls matched per line, but I will post a summary after each set of drawings (Tuesday/Wednesday and Friday/Saturday) detailing how many matches we had and how much money we've won.

(DISCLAIMER: The 175,000 and 175 million numbers used are approximate. The actual odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 175,711,536 and the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 175,223,510. However, for our purposes it's enough to round that to 1 in 175,000,000. Buying 175,000 lines would actually reduce your odds to 1 in 1004.07 for Mega Millions and 1 in 1001.28 for Powerball. Again, for our purposes, 1 in 1000 is sufficient, and it makes the math a little easier.)

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