Kentucky United States
Member #32,651
February 14, 2006
10,301 Posts
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Quote: Originally posted by RJOh on Jul 30, 2010
Unless you've won a jackpot or the second prize in one of the multi-state games, the question should be "how much have you lost chasing the big prize". If I can keep my loses down to an affordable amount then I feel the chase has been worth the cost.
No one ever ask how much profit have you made drinking all those six packs or smoking those cartons of cigarette and yet where I buy my lottery tickets they make most of their money selling cigarettes, beer and gasoline.
While the cost of buying a pack of smokes a day is comparable to playing lottery games, the reasons for doing either are not.
I've always liked the smaller jackpot games like Buckeye 5, Rolling Cash 5, Ten Oh, and now I'm hooked on Cash Ball. With much smaller odds against us, winning a jackpot is more reasonable and with smaller overall odds of winning something, on average we're getting 5 chances to win the jackpot for $4 a drawing.
I did make a small profit over a 6 week period playing Rolling Cash 5 without ever hitting a jackpot but when you're playing $20 a day, it's not fun when you go two or three days in a row without any winning tickets. We can play a pick-3 number for over a year and show a small overall profit by hitting the number before the 500th drawing. To me even if I did hit a number once a year, it wouldn't be very much fun knowing I'd have 364 days winning nothing.