Quote: Originally posted by pumpi76 on May 10, 2008
Someone said: "If people in Ohio buy 10 times as many Mega Millions tickets as the people in Washington, then you know what? Ohio will have 10 times as many jackpot winners."
If people in Ohio buy 10 times more tickets than the people in Washington, they are 10 times more LIKELY to win than the people in Washington not necesarily means they are going to win more often, they are just more likely to win, but still the people in washington can still become as many winners as the people in Ohio..BECAUSE THE GAME IS RANDOM...
and i don't know how the lottery works but if for example....10 million people go to a gas station (i know is not going to be that much) but if 10 million people go to a gas station and buy lottery tickets in the form of quick picks and i heard that each lottery retailer machine independently and randomly selects the combinations, but because the machine selected 10 million only out of 150 million for powerball, it still leaves it with 140 million but because you are not likely to select the winning combinations by just covering 10 million out of 150 million, the jackpot will not be won....Now multiply 10 million scenario that happens in 1 gas station times 20,000 or whatever number of gas stations that there are in the States...20,000 x 10 million comes out to be either 2 billion or 20 billion tickets sold before each drawing....
And because in each gas station they only covered 6% of total amount of combinations that powerball has, the jackpot is not likely to be won on no gas station...And the lottery theoretically speaking just made 2 billion dollars and the jackpot for powerball is only 10 million....
And then after each drawing the machines are going to repeat the same process again and start back from "0" and cover only 6%...(if is 10 million if is less than 10 million then the percentage is going to be less)
Well i kind of exaggerated the number for the sake of clarity in explaining....No gas station is going to sell 10 million tickets....Now let's assume is not 10 million but instead 500,000 tickets where sold at each gas station, then that will be covering 0.33% (or less than 1%) of the entire Powerball combinations this means that each of the 20,000 retailers will be covering less than 1% of the entire powerball combinations and NONE of them will win it or are extremely unlikely to win the jackpot, and if you multiply 20,00 retailers or whatever number of retailers that there are in the U.S times 500,000 it comes out to be 20,000 x 500,000 = 1E10 (i don't know what's that number but i think is 1 BILLION i know is not 100 million) Actually is more than 1 billion because 500,000 x 2,000 is 1 billion....LOL...So in total the lottery will collect more than 1 billion before each Powerball drawing, again theoretically speaking....But because no gas station is going to sell 500,000 worth of tickets, that figure/number will be lower...If each gas stations sell 125,000 tickets the number will be 250 million....If each gas station sells 32,000 tickets then the figure will be 62 million before each drawing that the lottery will collect...That's with 20,000 lottery retailers accross the U.S.A
This is one way that the lottery can do to not make the jackpot NOT be won, and let it continue climbing instead of jacking up the price or continually changing the matrix....