Zeta Reticuli Star System United States
Member #30,469
January 17, 2006
12,538 Posts
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CDanaT, Ironic that you keep calling MM 'measly millions". Maybe the only real "measly" is so many people's reluctance to bet a 'measly' $5 for a chance at winning hundreds of millions.
Texas United States
Member #55,887
October 23, 2007
22,471 Posts
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Quote: Originally posted by CDanaT on Jul 6, 2026
Speaking of the Powerball..... I see on the main page that the launch in the UK is July 21st..... Might be time for a new topic/pole on how we are sending our lotteries to other countries. See how folks feel about that and if the participation rate declines or increases.
I'll prolly skip PB also along with MM.
Just focus on 2 Step and Lotto. $1 games.
JUST LOOK AT THE ODDS OF ANY JACKPOT GAME, THAT WILL TELL YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW
NY United States
Member #23,834
October 16, 2005
5,145 Posts
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"MM went for 40 draws under the $5.00 ticket to produce a jackpot of $485.2 cash/$980 annuity.
If you can do math, that's 5 months."
And? How long it takes is irrelevant to the probability of happening. Given your username I'd think it should be easy enough to understand.
"play all ya want, no one is gonna win till the breaks the billion dollar mark "
Somebody could win this Friday, but it's more likely that it won't be won until they sell about another 145 million tickets. If sales continued to match the last 3 weeks it will take 9 or 10 weeks to do that, at which point the cash value would be about $465 million and the annuity would be about $1.05 billion. If past sales at $5 follow the tend for the $980 million jackpot last November we could get there in "only" 5 weeks.
"The marketing claim that it would produce bigger jackpots faster has been shown to be nonsense. "
Even allowing for a drop in ticket sales due to the higher price the claim wasn't unrealistic, and it was even true for a short time. It may even still be true but not obvious because we can't see how fast slow the jackpot would be growing if the price was still $2. Despite still being $2 per ticket PB sales have also gone down over the same period, continuing a trend that's been going on since long before MM raised the price. The data is easy to find if anyone wants to make an honest comparison instead of just whining about the slowing pace of MM.
"Maybe the only real "measly" is so many people's reluctance to bet a 'measly' $5 for a chance at winning hundreds of millions. "
Are you completely uneducable or is it just the lottery that's difficult for you?
Colorado United States
Member #173,294
February 25, 2016
1,168 Posts
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Normal businesses consolidate or have sales when business slows.
The dummies at MUSL did the opposite. They should have consolidated PB and MM and dropped the price to $1.
Unlike almost everything else in life, the price of a lottery ticket is not goods or services. You're buying a chance to win. A more expensive chance to win should equal a higher probability. Not with MM. 2.5 times the price for the same (approximately) chance of winning.
I'll never understand why MM sales didn't drop to zero with the new game. Clearly there are lots of idiots out there.
New Jersey United States
Member #21,205
September 4, 2005
984 Posts
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Quote: Originally posted by KY Floyd on Jul 8, 2026
"MM went for 40 draws under the $5.00 ticket to produce a jackpot of $485.2 cash/$980 annuity.
If you can do math, that's 5 months."
And? How long it takes is irrelevant to the probability of happening. Given your username I'd think it should be easy enough to understand.
"play all ya want, no one is gonna win till the breaks the billion dollar mark "
Somebody could win this Friday, but it's more likely that it won't be won until they sell about another 145 million tickets. If sales continued to match the last 3 weeks it will take 9 or 10 weeks to do that, at which point the cash value would be about $465 million and the annuity would be about $1.05 billion. If past sales at $5 follow the tend for the $980 million jackpot last November we could get there in "only" 5 weeks.
"The marketing claim that it would produce bigger jackpots faster has been shown to be nonsense. "
Even allowing for a drop in ticket sales due to the higher price the claim wasn't unrealistic, and it was even true for a short time. It may even still be true but not obvious because we can't see how fast slow the jackpot would be growing if the price was still $2. Despite still being $2 per ticket PB sales have also gone down over the same period, continuing a trend that's been going on since long before MM raised the price. The data is easy to find if anyone wants to make an honest comparison instead of just whining about the slowing pace of MM.
"Maybe the only real "measly" is so many people's reluctance to bet a 'measly' $5 for a chance at winning hundreds of millions. "
Are you completely uneducable or is it just the lottery that's difficult for you?
Yeah, well whatever. I can see the numbers, as can anyone who bothers to look intelligently. If one is unintelligent, that's another matter. It is something called a "fact" that the $5 version of Megamillions ran for 40 draws without producing a billion dollar (annuity) jackpot. It is also a fact that the pretax expectation value has never gone beyond 0.5, something Powerball, as well as the $2.00 MM did a number of times.
If one looks at expectation values, it's immediately obvious to anyone who isn't a fool, that buying 5 Powerball tickets is far better bet than buying two MM tickets right now. The current expectation value (pretax cash) as of this writing, for a cash PB jackpot of $194M is 0.5, whereas that of MM is 0.36 at a cash value of $266M, using a Poisson distribution to determine the number of probable winners, and including the odds of lower prizes, weighted for the low 10X and 5X probabilities for compulsory multipliers. The 10X adds a - let's use a popular word in this forum - "measly" 0.0189 to the expectation value. Winning $10 million is less probable than winning the full jackpot. The minute a ticket is printed, that expectation value collapses into a generally lower number.
However it's not my job to convince a fool..,
In my career, it used to surprise me how many obviously poorly educated people feel entitled to complain about the education of others. One consistent feature of the uneducated is arrogance; consider the confused excuse for a President in the White House.
Some of these people might benefit by opening a math book, or better yet, an on line MOOC course AND a textbook, but generally they show no evidence of having done so. It's rather amazing how many people pontificate on subjects about which they clearly know very little.
Playing the lottery is just a kind of fun exercise in pretending mathematics doesn't matter so much as the fun of a daydream of course, and I don't expect much mathematical sophistication being attached to it by "serious" players. Playing the lottery is not serious; it's just fun. I've always looked at it as an amusement more than a practical matter, but since I'm relatively well off in my professional life, I can afford it and in my State, the money goes to education, something that is increasingly missing in our times and something I wish to support by paying some additional tax, which is what the lottery is, a tax.
Zeta Reticuli Star System
