IT IS ENTERTAINMENT MY FRIEND. I PLAYED 1 OF THOSE LINES THOUGH.
"You could buy 50 tickets per week for the next 70 years of your life, and you STILL would have, by any practical measure, ZERO chance of ever hitting the jackpot.
"By any practical measure" - what do I mean by that? Well, in the case of the PowerBall, it would take you almost 1,000 lifetimes of that sort of excessive waste just to expect to hit the jackpot once. It's simply never going to happen.
Here are a few more things to keep in mind if you feel yourself getting addicted to these tickets:
The lottery only pays back about 50 cents for every dollar it collects. So for every $100,000 it collects in ticket sales, only about $50,000 will be put aside for winning tickets. By the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with taxes. People who win bigger prizes will then also have to pay taxes.
At a 50% payback rate, no other standard form of gambling on the planet comes even close to being as bad a bet. The lottery is truly a TAX on the poor and on the ignorant.
Here's one more thing I'll tell you before I say how much I buy lottery tickets: Over 70 BILLION dollars is p*ssed down the drain each year on lottery tickets in the USA alone! That is more money spent than on the entire movie and music industries combined! It is a travesty that we should waste so much money when our economy is hurting so badly. If everyone spent the dollars they waste on the lottery on buying something at a store, this country would be lifted out of this slump much, much quicker.
I used to spend TONS of money on lottery tickets. I had my own Lotto numbers, and because I had my own, I felt compelled to play them every drawing. I thought, "What if I don't play MY numbers and they hit tonight?!?" Guess what? They never hit. I quit playing the lottery over 15 years ago. Had I continued to play, "my" numbers would have won the very smallest 2-dollar prize about 6 times in all these years. I've saved TONS of money by quitting!
Do I ever play? Yes, I do. Once in a while, when the big games get up over 200 or 300 million dollars, I'll buy just ONE ticket. For the price of 1 ticket once in a while, it's worth it to give me that dream of "hitting it big". Any more spent than that is a total waste of money.
Put it this way - if it's your destiny to win the lottery, then you will win it whether you buy 1 ticket per month or if you buy hundreds of tickets per week. Just buy 1 ticket once in a great while. If you were meant to win the lottery, you'll win it with that 1 ticket. If not, you won't." By PDQ