Poisson Rollover/Winner Probabilities on the $635M Jackpot

Reply #4

Prob988 — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 15:12:59 GMT

The actual sales were 342.2M, and the actual outcome, two winners was slightly less probable than another rollover. Note that these sales figres were a little more than half of what they were in the last $600+ (annuity) drawing, albeit with a reduced cash fraction on the new matrix. It also took 22 draws to get there, as opposed to 19 the last time this happened.

It will be interesting to watch the behavior of the lottery under the new matrix for a full run starting from $15M annuity. Compare... [ More ]

Reply #3

LottoMetro — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:20:05 GMT

Yeah, my numbers are just projections.....they are usually pretty close but during mega mania they can be understated. Anyway, during the last drawing they didn't adjust the cash jackpot upwards from the additional 35 million+ in sales, so this is probably what caused the difference.

Reply #2

Prob988 — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:12:12 GMT

I used the last announced cash prize and the current cash prize to calculate the approximate sales. I fully concede that the sales numbers may prove to be different.

It's just an approximation.

Reply #1

LottoMetro — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 22:12:05 GMT

Did you factor in the excess from last draw? MUSL is projecting sales of 319,490,000.

Any Winner 0.70890

0 0.29110

1 0.35924

2 0.22167

3 0.09118

4 0.02813

5 0.00694

More than 5 0.00172

If it rolls til Friday, MUSL is projecting sales of 536,700,000.

Any Winner 0.87420

0 0.12580

1 0.26079

2 0.27032

3 0.18680

4 0.09681

5 0.04014

More than 5 0.01935

I agree about the expectation, I did not thin... [ More ]

Poisson Rollover/Winner Probabilities on the $635M Jackpot

Prob988 — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 22:00:39 GMT

The lottery is estimating that they will sell around 342.5 M tickets, based on the cash value size.

If this proves accurate, the randomized poisson distribution suggests the following probabilities for numbers of winners:

k, number of winners p(m,k)

0 26.64%

1 35.24%

2 23.30%

3 10.27%

4 3.40%

5 0.90%

6 0.20%

7 0.04%

8 0.01%

In reality, anything can happen, but the most probable outcome is a single winner, and there is about a 1 in 4 ch... [ More ]