Money well Spent with Lee Kent . . .

Since times are so hard now, some friends and I have come up with a great way to win the Power Ball Lottery. Ten of us have agreed to put in $10 each for every drawing. This increases our chances a hundred times at winning the big money. The game is drawn twice a week, so at the end of a year we will have 10,400 times the chances of just one ticket. We should be able to win at least one jackpot, right?

What you are saying is that 100 tickets should have 100 times the odds of winning as a single ticket. This idea sounds great, until you realize that statistics does work this way. To come up with the actual odds, you have to divide the number of tickets bought by the odds of winning. The odds are just over 175 million to one. As exciting as it may be, I will not bore you with how this number is calculated. You can Google it to see exactly how it is done.

Back to the players…

One Ticket One Hundred Tickets
1 / 175,000,000 = 0.000000006 100 / 175,000,000 = 0.0000006

You should look closely at the odds of winning the jackpot, they round to zero for each player. In order to have a 1 in 100 chance of winning the jackpot, you would need to buy 1,750,000 tickets. Even buying this many tickets, you are 99% certain of losing! These are not just horrible odds, they are sucker odds. You are all but assured that any money spent on the lottery is wasted.

Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying not to play the lottery. After all, you cannot win if you do not play. Someone has to win. What I am saying is to only play the lottery with money that you can afford to lose. And you are going to lose it.

Even after understanding the lousy odds, if you still want to play the lottery, buy just one ticket! You will have the EXACT same odds of winning as someone that buys 100 tickets or even 10,000. You will just have a lot more money in your pocket!

The chances of being hit by lightning are around 1 in 10,000,000 or 0.0000001. Another way of looking at it is- you are 20 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the Power Ball.

Good luck… you will need it!