lotto question

tech77

I know doing the lotto regularly doesn't pay off.

But is it worth doing after it reaches a particular figure?

And if so would you increase your chances if you were ONLY to do all the lottos around the world that had rolled over significantly at any given time.

(significantly meaning when a given lotto hits an amount which makes it worth doing).

Apart from the logistics involved, would this be an effective way of making money from lotteries.
Kinda like harnessing the power of all the "unlucky" rollover lottos around he world at a given time.

Or is this completely wrong.
I'm thinking it probably is.

Xavi6

This looks like a job for...........Brian Nolan!!!

Thomas_S_Hunterson

tech77 wrote: »

I know doing the lotto regularly doesn't pay off.

But is it worth doing after it reaches a particular figure?

When the expected return is greater than the cost of a line then...maybe

tech77 wrote: »

Apart from the logistics involved, would this be an effective way of making money from lotteries.

No, unless you had the resources to buy every combination and take the risk of a shared jackpot.

ZorbaTehZ

As it rolls over the amount of advertising done is increased majorly and hence you have so many more people doing it that it usually balances out the odds of winning.

just-joe

I think it would be fairly safe to say this is completely wrong. As a maths student I should know this but anyway,here goes:

And if so would you increase your chances if you were ONLY to do all the lottos around the world that had rolled over significantly at any given time.

Increase your chances of winning the jackpot? This definitely isn't true because all cases are independent, and the probability is the same every single time.

So if youre only playing one line on lots of big jackpots, you'll still be paying the same amount of money and winning as often, (almost never). Also, note that the chances are so small that, if you buy two lines, yes youre chances of winning are twice as big, but two multiplied by a very small number is still a very small number, so your chances are practically the same. (or for that matter 3 or 4 or 5 lines, anyone who spends more than four euros on the lotto is really just wasting their money).


However if you were to play the lotto an amount of times large enough that would be in proportion to the infinitesimally small chances of winning, (talking hundreds of millions) or have enough lines on the one lotto, and playing only when the jackpot was big enough to outweight the cost of buying all the lines, then the expected gain would be bigger when the jackpot was only small.

However this might not work because the jackpot would have to be extraordinarily large to be able to outweigh the cost of the amount of tickets which you would have to buy to play safely.

I aint sure about the figures here, its around 76 million to one for the euromillions, times two per line so the jacpot would have to be in excess of 140m. Not sure though, sorry if I'm wrong.

I'd say the most cost effective way would be to play many tickets on one lotto (instead of millions of weeks of draws), and buy enough lines to be fairly safe of a win, maybe 75%, but not completely, thus making the expected gain bigger.

People have done this before in Ireland and elsewhere, and have been caught before they bought all of em, or else never collected cos the taxman was after them.

Hopefully that clears up things, and i havent been talking crap, just some chat i remember from statistics two years ago! if it doesnt clear anything up, stop worrying and never play again, youre never gonna win!

gerry87

If the irish jackpot is over 18m then it's +EV. (It hit the magic number a couple of weeks ago). You could buy every possible ticket and still make a profit.

Zorba does have a point about advertising increases, while it doesn't at all change the odds of winning, it increases the probability of you splitting the jackpot if you do win.

BrokenArrows

i think its far less than that is it not.

the total amount of combinations is 8,145,060 x €1.50 = €12,217,590 magic number.

even if you had that amount of money how would you go about getting that many tickets.

M.T. Cranium

If you had that much money you could open a casino and increase your net worth without nearly as much effort, but it would still involve luck -- other peoples' bad luck that is.

alan4cult

BrokenArrows wrote: »

i think its far less than that is it not.

the total amount of combinations is 8,145,060 x €1.50 = €12,217,590 magic number.

even if you had that amount of money how would you go about getting that many tickets.

It was done before in the May Bank Holiday 1992 Draw.
The National Lottery turned off some of the machines which wasn't really fair.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_National_Lottery
In a 6/36 lottery, the odds of matching all six numbers and winning the jackpot are 1 in 1,947,792. At Lotto's initial cost of £0.50 for each six-number combination, all possible combinations could be purchased for £973,896, which left Lotto vulnerable to a brute force attack of the kind that happened when the jackpot reached £1.7 million for the May 1992 bank holiday drawing. At that time, a 28-member Dublin-based syndicate, organized and headed by Polish-Irish businessman Stefan Klincewicz, tried to buy up all possible combinations and thus win all possible prizes, including the jackpot. Klincewicz's team had spent six months preparing for the brute-force attack by marking combinations on almost a quarter of a million paper playslips.

Axwell

alan4cult wrote: »

It was done before in the May Bank Holiday 1992 Draw.
The National Lottery turned off some of the machines which wasn't really fair.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_National_Lottery
In a 6/36 lottery, the odds of matching all six numbers and winning the jackpot are 1 in 1,947,792. At Lotto's initial cost of £0.50 for each six-number combination, all possible combinations could be purchased for £973,896, which left Lotto vulnerable to a brute force attack of the kind that happened when the jackpot reached £1.7 million for the May 1992 bank holiday drawing. At that time, a 28-member Dublin-based syndicate, organized and headed by Polish-Irish businessman Stefan Klincewicz, tried to buy up all possible combinations and thus win all possible prizes, including the jackpot. Klincewicz's team had spent six months preparing for the brute-force attack by marking combinations on almost a quarter of a million paper playslips.

This is why they added the extra numbers to the lotto making it practically impossible financially and physically to do it anymore. It would take forever to site there and mark the tickets. And that magic figure only applies if you are the sole winner so really its not even worth doing considering the biggest jackpot here was something around 18million, you would spend 12million and come out with less if its shared