New Jersey United States
Member #21,205
September 4, 2005
963 Posts
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The New York Lottery exists with a lot of secretive stuff. It's hard to determine cash values and sales.
Lotteries that are not worth playing can become worth playing though, if their jackpots become high enough.
I have estimated the NY Lotto sales from the fact that the jackpot has grown by two million, that the cash value is probably somewhere around 47% (they hide it) and that 30% of sales, according to their website, shows up in the jackpot prize. I'm guessing the sales are going to be about 3.1 million for this game.
Thus it is possible in the usual way to estimate the probability of various numbers of winners:
0
87.02%
1
12.10%
2
0.84%
3
0.04%
I ignore taxes in determining expectation values and I find with its current jackpot, the NY Lottery now has an expectation value (ratio of reward/odds) that is close to one. This makes it a decent bet. My last tickets lost, but I am going to play the game again this week, taking a drive over to NY.
New Jersey United States
Member #21,205
September 4, 2005
963 Posts
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Note that NY Lotto sales seem not to go up very much with jackpot size. If the lottery continues to grow by $2M annuity levels, there is about a 50% probability of 5 more draws before the jackpot is won. Probably sales will ultimately grow, but this would be the case if they stay steady.
New Jersey United States
Member #21,205
September 4, 2005
963 Posts
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Prob988, when do you start your probablistic analysis on NY Lotto and why?
I started looking at it recently.
Any lottery where the jackpot is close to the odds is worth a look.
Generally, I would not play the NY Lotto, since it gives a low return. With a lot of rollovers though, it's worth it. I have some tickets for Wednesday and Saturday, since I believe there is a pretty fair probability that there will be two rollovers. This does not mean that there will be a rollover, but there is a very good chance of it.
Normally I would not play NY if MM or PB were fair sized and had reasonable expectation values. But with low jackpots, neither MM nor PB are really worth it. NY is currently the only game in town worth playing.
I will probably play PB and MM if they roll on the next draws.
New Jersey United States
Member #21,205
September 4, 2005
963 Posts
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How big the NY Lotto jackpot must be in order for you to play this game Prob988? Good luck to you.
I play, very modestly, local lotteries, when their expectation values, pre-tax, get to around 0.4. I calculate the pretax expectation value, the ratio of the potential cash prize(s) to the odds of winning, for lotteries in which I have interest using the same mathematics that I use for the MM and PB posts I make here.
I will not drive a significant distance for a lottery unless the expectation value is greater than 0.9.
The odds for PB and MM lotteries are so long that their jackpots would have to be close to 300M to have expectation values this high.
New York right now is about 0.95 as I calculate it. This is worth a relatively short drive in my mind.
Although I do not know how sales correspond to rises in the jackpot in California, I would guess that right now the expectation value for the California jackpot is better than one. If the current drawing there produces 25M in ticket sales - and again I have no idea what the real figure is - the CA Superlotto has a pretax expectation value of more than 1.2. This is excellent, but I am too far from California to participate.
With the reset jackpot, MM has an expectation value of less than 0.25. I will not play it.