I was recently reading through an old Casino Player Magazine which brought up some interesting things about odds. An article was talking about a man who won the MegaBucks jackpot on a slot machine where the odds are 1 in 50,000,000. He not only won it once....he won it twice....16 years apart! The first time for $4.6 mil...the second for $21 mil.
The thing that got me thinking was an example the writer explained about what the man's actual odds were to win this twice.
He says that picture you're an average casino player. You play a session once every week for 3 hours.....on average a player spins about 600 times an hour. So that would be about 48 sessions a year (assuming you miss a few due to holidays and such). That's 86,400 spins a year and if you were like this Megabuck winning man who took 16 years to win the second jackpot...that would have been 1,382,400 spins he took in 16 years.
Now picture you're an average lottery player. The odds against us aren't as high as 50 million I don't believe for any game but try substituting "tickets" for "spins" above.
The writer said that to figure out the man's odds of hitting it twice would be to divide 1,382,400 by 50 million and that would have been his odds to win again....1 in 36.
I just thought it was interesting and couldn't help thinking about lottery jackpots in relation.
Food For Thought.....