Quote: Originally posted by KY Floyd on Feb 22, 2019
"on average it is 500,000 drawn raffle numbers."
So you're saying there's slightly better than a 50.0000% chance that your number will be in the first 500,000 numbers selected than in the last 500,000 numbers selected?
"IMO, the best way to express chances of winning anything is by using percentages."
In many instances I think that would work well, but there are a few problems. One is that a lot of people don't really know what percentages mean. And there are the very steep odds of some games. Telling most people that their chance of winning MM with one ticket is 0.0000003305% will mean a lot less than 1 in 302,575,350. And even though most people should realize that 1 in 302,575,350 is really bad odds I can't imagine the lottery using all those leading zeros when they tell people how likely they are to win.
"That means at on average $10 a ticket, players must spend $5 million to win a prize."
I think you've misunderstood how the (pretend) raffle works. There are a million tickets and a million prizes. Every ticket wins a prize, so to be sure of winning a prize you need to buy one ticket.
Of course which prize you win will depend on when your number is selected, and we would expect that the average value of a prize would be $5 or $6 if tickets cost $10. Out of $10 million in sales the lottery keeps $4 to $5 million, so the 1 million winning tickets are worth a total of $5 to $6 million. Like PB, MM and other games the bulk of the money will go to a few big prizes and the vast majority of players will lose money even though "Everybody Wins!" Assuming prizes are awarded sequentially as ticket numbers are drawn, and starting with the biggest prize you'd want your number to be drawn long before they draw the 500,000th winner.