There wasn't a first prize winner in Take5 last nite. That's not unusual, but when that happens, it makes it very easy to calculate how much money was allocated to the prize pool (the $$ paid out by The NY Lottery to all winners) and also how much $$ was taken in for the drawing.
The split of the total "take" is 50/50. (Half of the money from all tickets sold is allocated to the prize pool, The State of NY keeps the other half)
The total take yesterday was $1,400,952. That means a total of 1,400,952 lines were sold. It also means that 1,400,952 combinations of five numbers were sold. BUT! There were a lot of duplicate lines/combo's sold. For instance, many people play 1 2 3 4 5, so many lines of that particular combo were sold. We cant see and don't know how many unique lines/combo's were sold.
Because nobody won the jackpot, the total number of combo's sold had to be less than 575,757 which is the total possible number of combo's in a 5/39 matrix. My guess is that The NY Lottery knows (or can probably find out) how many unique combo's were sold. They could run a computer program against all of the lines/combo's that were sold, and have it throw out all of the duplicated lines/combo's and then count each remaining unique line/combo. If they had sold 287,879 combo's, then there'd have been a 50 percent chance of a jackpot being won. (287,879 is half of 575,757)
I've been keeping an eye on the total dollars allocated to the prize pool. It's usually about $600,000 for each drawing. That means they take in about $1,200,000 for the majority of Take5 drawings. On Sunday's it's usually less than that. Friday always has the biggest take, and if there's a JP winner, it's usually $60,000 or more.
So what's all this mean to the average guy playing Take5? Absolutely nuthin. It's weirdo's like me that are interested in that crap. Most people just wanna win 50 or 60 grand. They aint interested in the business side of the lottery. They're interested in the winnin' side! Come to think of it, so am I!!! G5