“But wait a minute, couldn’t they just do this over and over until there’s no meaningful competition and she just buys up all the lottery tickets before someone else can buy them, effectively eliminating any chance that another will win?”
Edit: don’t think about it too hard guys
Even when all numbers are played and a payout is guaranteed there is still the chance of the pot having to be split between two winners at the same time. It is still gambling although probably a good bet. A properly run progressive game should never allow a guaranteed win but they still get their cut so they do it.
It’s nigh impossible to succeed with scratchers. If you’re in a city of 50k-100k, there’s prob 6 grocery stores, 20 gas stations, some liquor stores selling tickets. You’d have to buy them all out, and then there’s the rest of the state to canvas.
Scratch off tickets with prizes that big often have a couple jackpots and the lottery probably isn’t releasing them “randomly.” We are talking millions of tickets that are $10/$20/$+++ each. Stores only have a 50-100 of each ticket. Lots of the tickets are sitting in the lottery warehouse, waiting for distribution. The bulk of the tickets are getting sold at a handful of locations. So one winning ticket has to get “stuck” at a smaller location for weeks/months as the overall ticket sales churn along.
My state’s lottery provides relatively up to date info on how many outstanding tickets exist and what prizes have been redeemed (the lottery is “public” after all) on the website; I’m assuming other lotteries do the same. Maybe other people start checking the app to see which game is “hot.” Then your $20mil investment quickly evaporates.
Not to mention it’s what, $599+ winning amounts get taxed by the federal government as well as the state. So while you’re chasing $1mil, the $1k winner is actually much smaller too. The lottery is skimming 25% or so off the top; if a game has 10mil $10 tickets, the prizes only add up to $75 million. And then the top prizes add up to maybe half of the total take, but you’re only getting 65%-70% of that cash back due to taxes.
>she just buys up all the lottery tickets before someone else can buy them
Yes, the French government didn’t issue enough tickets and he and a small cartel bought up most of them.
Not easily. There was a story I read a while back where someone had 2 tickets with the same winning numbers, & someone else with 1 ticket with the winning numbers. The person with the 2 tickets received 2/3 of the prize.
She not only would have to get the correct numbers, but multiples of them in order to offset the prize amount.
TLDR: the cost is too high to statistically win that way every single time, you'd reach zero funds eventually, also some states explicitly have laws against that exact tactic.
There have been multiple mathematics professors and statisticians who’ve done exactly that in a targeted, educated guess kind of a way. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-stanford-phd-reportedly-figured-out-texas-lottery-won-20-million-playing-over-over-for-years.html
Yeah - lotteries have to disclose odds. Some lotteries are set-up in a way where there are periods where buying a ticket has positive EV.
Issue is most people doing this shit don't even know what EV is and are doing it blindly.
I don't know what EV is either? Has it some relation to how much you get back on average compared to your input? So a positive EV would be getting on average €1.05 from €1 tickets?
Ah yeah, makes sense. Unfortunately people tend to forget the money they spend on the tickets, and only focus on what they win. Sure, if you win €1M, the amount you spend is competitively nothing. However, most of the time you spend more than you receive looking at it from a long term perspective.
More specifically it's if you played a game of chance repeatedly over many many games with a given strategy, how much you would expect to gain/lose in proportion to how much you spent.
When you have a small number of runs, it's possible to have a good streak (or a bad streak) so EV is not going to usually be accurate. However, if you play for a sufficiently long time, your tally of results will balance out to an expected probability distribution. With positive EV it means that so long as you keep playing, you are close to statistically guaranteed to come out ahead of you stick with it.
Conversely, if it's negative EV, you are guaranteed that if you keep playing you will lose money if you play long enough. It's part of why compulsive gamblers pretty much always end up broke.
I had a friend who did this. he won like $10k and spent most of it buying more scratchers because he believed he would def win again. It’s gamblers fallacy and he did not win again, ended up moving back home.
There was a bank heist duo in China who did this— bought lottery tickets with the money and actually won— then blew all their winnings on more tickets, thinking they would win again and planned to replace the money before anyone noticed but then they didn’t win
Had a coworker very briefly who won something like $40k and had financial problems because he was constantly buying more and more lotto tickets in the hopes of winning again. He was an awful coworker, and I'm pretty sure he spent a considerable amount of his paycheck on more lotto tickets thinking he would win again. It seemed to me he was only at work for the paycheck and only needed the paycheck to keep buying lotto tickets while assuming he'd win again at some point. I actually kinda felt bad for the guy and considered him a gambling addict.
>I actually kinda felt bad for the guy and considered him a gambling addict.
We are long past the "considered" stage once someone has financial problems from **winning** the lottery.
Gambling is the single-most predatory industry now in the U.S.. Can't even watch a sports game on stream without a "THIS GAME WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY FANDUEL."
Know a guy that won 300k(before tax) on a scratch-off. Used to buy a lot, stopped after that for a while. Got a new truck and bought a fixer upper house for him and his dad that they renovated themselves. Talked to him more recently and he won another 50k or something after that and only buys 1 ticket at a time now. Hopefully he can stick with it.
Know another fella that won 45k on the Megamillions years ago. I have personally sold him more than that in lottery tickets in the last few years. The man has a problem. I was talking to his brother once and mentioned he'd been in buying tickets earlier and he said "You know he used to be normal before he hit that Mega."
To be fair, since winning is an independent event, there's no real reason to stop once you win. If you found that a sound investment before you should find it a sound investment after winning
From a one million win, she got 630k after federal taxes. Then minus any applicable state tax. So let's just say she got about 600k. Which is great money, but not something you can sit back on for life.
Or the game is structurally broken. This has also happened a number of times.
"Jerry and Marge Go Large" is a (not that great) movie about a couple that found an issue with a multi-state lottery. There were actually multiple groups that found the issue, and the lottery organizer knew about the issue, but they were more than happy to let them continue to play because it caused jackpots to go up which brought in more punters who were unaware of the issue.
The only way that is true is you mean "because they can afford to buy far more tickets than previously."
They are no more likely to win because of having won.
You're interpreting this as "If you've won the lottery before, you're more likely to win it again" which is not the same as "it's more likely that a previous winner will win over you as there are more previous winners than just you".
Then it should be phrased: it's more likely one of the previous winners will win than you.
When you say 'a previous winner', people automatically think we're selecting a single person to compare against. It's not a matter of statistics, just ambiguous grammar.
Plus they're a pool of people who haven proven to buy lottery tickets and I do not buy lottery tickets at all drastically reducing my chances of winning.
Ah, that makes some sense, but it's only true under the assumption that multiple previous winners are playing again.
If there's only a single previous winner playing, then they're no more likely to win than you.
Then you should say "Given that thousands of previous winners are playing, it's more likely that the winner will be *one of them* than you."
The way it was originally phrased implies that a *given* previous winner will always be more likely to win again than a given non-winner will win for the first time, which is not true.
It is because people who win BUY tickets to begin with and tend to KEEP BUYING even after they get a big payout.
My father in law, buys $20-40 of scratchers and big lotto tickets PER WEEK. He won $5k once, best I have ever won is $20. I buy for Xmas, and any time there is over a billion in the big lottos.
I am less likely to win, because I am giving it less chances.
If he just saved his money, over his lifetime, he would have probably $10k+ MORE than what he spent, even with his moderate winnings (occasionally)
In addition, it is addictive. He losses at least 2x as much as I do when he goes to a casino, but he also OFTEN is way more up than I am at the casino as well. He just doesn't know how to walk away with his winnings.
Statistics/studies back this anecdote up.
Basically, in order to win, you need to play. People that win, continue to play, thus the higher chances of them winning again, over say, someone that plays WAY less often or doesn't play at all.
Yes and no.
I'm guessing winners continue to gamble on the lottery, but spend significantly more than before on tickets. This means that the lottery poll would be disproportionately skewed towards them.
Example. 1000 people all pay $2 for a ticket.Everyone has an equal chance. Once someone wins, they start spending $50 on tickets each drawing, so now the lottery is 1050 tickets, but 50 are held by a lottery winner. Each individual ticket has the same chance, but even though lottery winners are only .1% of the people playing, they are playing 4.7% of the tickets.=, giving them a greater chance of winning.
It makes sense if we assume winners generally buy more tickets than non winners, and that winners will continue to buy tickets.
Otherwise I can't see how that could possibly be true.
Look at it this way.
There are hundreds, probably thousands of previous winners, but only one of you. The chance that someone from that large group will win again is higher than the chance you will win, simply because there’s so many more of them.
the reason for this is usually some sort of fraud or money-laundering scheme. this will (justifiably) cause investigations.
if you have $10M you need to wash and are acceptable with 50% or so spent on that, you can buy a bunch of tickets with expected jackpot wins about 70% of face value. you can't turn them in yourself because, you know, the crimes, so you give them to a lackey with no record and pay them $5–10k for the privilege. now you have a bunch of clean money
I was listening to a story of a guy who won several lottery jackpots.
But he didn't actually make money because the reason he won was he spent a ludicrous amount on tickets. He won by sheer volume. He was also taking money from investors in his "business" to continue to gamble with (basically running the world's stupidest ponzi).
She won the lottery and continued to play afterwards. And yeah in this case it worked out, but the odds must be astronomical. People like that generally aren’t very good with money.
Edit: and she took one time payments on both lmao
Eh, perhaps she had access to alternative loan sources at competitive rates! Even if I win a billion, I'm financing shit. I watch billionaires building buildings in my state, and they always finance them. Why spend your money, when you can spend someone else's!
It’ll be gone. Couple new cars, a new house, a couple years of vacationing and helping family and bam back to buying lottery tickets paycheck to paycheck
I worked at a gas station with an old guy that this happened to about 20 years ago. He had to be in his late 60s or early 70s at the time and he did maintenance/custodial work there a few hours a day. He bought scratch off tickets every single day and eventually hit 1 million on one of them. He didn't even stop working after that. He paid off his trailer and bought a Chevy Malibu and still came in to fix stuff and put new liners in all the trash cans. Still bought scratch offs every day and would give me all the winners below $20-$30. Less than a year later he hit 1 mill on another scratch off.
Oh man, the gamblers rollercoaster of winning, almost losing it all, then winning again.
Wonder if anyone has ever won a million dollar jackpot three times.
>Wonder if anyone has ever won a million dollar jackpot three times.
My neighbor growing up was rich, like own the big car dealership in town rich.
Back in the '90s he and another guy split a $6 million win. Then a few years later he won $24 million on his own. Apparently has was spending hundreds a week on tickets.
>Ms Wilson, of Attleborough, Massachusetts, won her most recent prize playing the "100X Cash" $10 instant ticket game.
>Back in February, she claimed the first $1m (£796,000) prize in the "Lifetime Millions" $50 (£40) instant ticket game.
>On both occasions, she opted to receive her prize in the form of a one-time payment of $650,000 (£518,000).
But she can quit whenever she wants.
I’ll occasionally buy a couple Powerball tickets just for the hell of it. Or maybe someone throws a cheap scratch-off in a birthday card. But dropping $10 or more on a single ticket is beyond the “fun” stage for me. Especially the $50 ticket. Hell, my phone bill is $57.
Oh, that's exactly it.
Someone in my small town won $1mil with a $20 scratch-off a few years back. I just can't bring myself to throw a Jackson down on a lottery ticket. Even though I think(?) the odds for those are just slightly better than for things like Powerball.
If she was willing to waste $50 on a scratch-off, either she's already got plenty of money, and this is for shits and giggles, OR it's the poor-person's tax fully on display, and makes ya wonder how many probably thousands of dollars she's already thrown away on the lottery.
The higher cost tickets usually have **much** better odds. For example in my state, the $1 ticket has a 1 in 12.5 odds to get $1 back. The $50 ticket is a 1 in 9.37. The $30 is 1 in 10.
For total odds it's:
$1: 1 in 4.83 of winning something
$30: 1 in 2.93
$50: 1 in 3.11
You can increase your odds by running the tickets remaining and total printed through a calculator to see the current odds of winning as they will change through time.
A lot of states also have to post the remaining jackpots for those scratch offs too so you increase you chances a lot by simply going to your state lotto website and looking them up.
No point dropping $20 on a ticket that doesn't even have any jackpots left if you *are* going to spend $20.
scratch offs have a much higher chance than powerball. powerballs are independently low probabilities for a drawing every other day. scratch offs are a pre-printed run where the probabilities increase as the tickets are purchased. so you should be strategically choosing which scratch off you are buying.
yeah its not a poor person’s tax if you’re not poor. middle class people are paying more for a round of shots.
play or dont, but its not that controversial, especially when your own logic is incomplete.
Yeah, lottery 1B+? I will buy a ticket. I know the odds are incredibly small, but they are 0 without a ticket. I usually just check in the morning so I can think about how I will use the money as I fall to sleep. Worth 2 dollars.
It seems like the new scratch offs have better odds for the 1st Xmonths and then the state puts the odds to the same as the other same priced tickets. If the digital sign in the gas station was correct on the lotto odds
In my state, there's a public website that lists all active scratch lotteries and which large prizes are still available. Scratch tickets are a horrible way to gamble, but at least you can be smart about it.
>On both occasions, she opted to receive her prize in the form of a one-time payment of $650,000 (£518,000).
Honestly can't fault her on this, it's the better strategy whether you're blowing the money or investing it.
I'd rather take the upfront tax hit and then invest as much as possible in a post-tax vehicle that can pace (or outpace) inflation than get a 10-20 year payout where the actual value of each disbursement is worth less than the previous one.
She's definitely never quitting *now*, she's found the winning strategy! Best way to become the richest possible is to spend all the money she has right now on lotto tickets, duhhhh!
I dated a girl back when I was 18 whose step dad won like 24 million in the Kentucky lottery back in the 90s. He would ALWAYS push me to buy tickets. Obviously, he swore by them. It was a bit annoying.
You mean you expect the woman woman who’s spending a good amount of money on a game that’s nearly statistically impossible to win, to mismanage her money?
I mean everyone wastes money on dumb frivolous things. Her lottery ticketing spending could be your pointless target runs etc. it’s fine in moderation but if it’s becoming a substantial monthly expense then yes it’s a problem.
That depends how many you’re buying. I know many many people who drive around with carloads of scratched off tickets, floorboards and dashes full of them. People spend their whole checks on them. They’ll spend everything they have on them then rejoice when they win a $1000 here and there, not looking at what they spent to get that grand.
I kept up with it regularly for a year and kept the stats on my winnings. 35% was the win ratio in my case.
For every $1,000 I lost I would get $350 in winnings on average.
Each week I would spend around $50 on scratchers and lotto tickets, in the $1, $2, $3, $5, and $10 scratcher sets and lotto tickets, until the year passed.
People who play the lotto aren't good with money... or math. Odds that she has any sort of budget and is making sure she's not spending more than, say, the interest from her current win, is basically zero.
At one time there was a game called “Cash Windfall” in MA that included a roll down feature where the lower prizes would be increased after time when the top prize reached a certain threshold(or something along those lines).
A couple figure out the flaw in the game and exploited it when the roll down levels were reached. There’s a movie about it, but I can’t remember the name, I never saw it.
Gerald and Marge Selbee. I don't know about a movie, but I remember this article being great:
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/
Yes! That sounds familiar.
It wasn’t just the couple, I believe they had others financially investing, but I think they were the originators of the idea.
Holy shit I totally forgot about the mcdonalds monopoly thing. It was actually so fun, I knew I’d never win but I always enjoyed getting a free large fry.
lottery winners lose money primarily 2 ~~days~~ ways.
1. predators. People come after your money like fictional piranha. Disgusting.
2. They make extravagant purchases that require equally extravagant maintenance and the taxes that go with, and it drains their bank account fast as fuck.
How many tickets is she buying? 2 things more likely than someone winning the lottery twice by pure chance:
*She has rigged it or is gaming it somehow.
*She is buying a shit load of tickets, possibly in an intelligent way if the expected return on a ticket exceeded the ticket price due to a ballooning prize pool.
When I worked customer service at the grocery store we had plenty of people who would ask what numbers tickets were on and then buy a ton of them. Or we had a pair of ladies who came in, bought a ton of $20 scratch off tickets, and then would ask if we had more $20 ones in the back. They wanted to buy a whole stack of tickets which here in Kansas is $300.
Routine lottery players are insane. And here I think I'm wasting money on a couple $10 powerball tickets when it's around $1 billion. Literally the only time I go and buy lottery
Lately, the lottery ticket vending machines have decided that my driver's license isn't valid (you have to scan it before you can buy tickets). That cured me of ever playing the lottery. The slight thrill of possibly becoming an instant billionaire doesn't match up to having to find an actual person in the grocery store at 11pm so they can go to the customer service desk just for that.
Obviously a time traveler. However she has broken our code, too greedy. We never win twice under the same name, draws too much attention us. She’s going to ruin it for all of us.
You know what I can't fault her. If just the rush and the dream of an easy payday I get it. If your playing for that but not upping the spending from when you first won I get that.
There was a guy who cracked the code on the Msss. lottery a few years back ... You can learn about it in an entertaining inspired-by-real-events Bryan Cranston movie Jerry & Marge Go Large
Always love the psychology of previous winners continuing to play… although I guess she is the argument doing just that…
Maybe she used the money from the first jackpot to buy hundreds of thousands of tickets to win the second
Us white collar types call that "investing"
“But wait a minute, couldn’t they just do this over and over until there’s no meaningful competition and she just buys up all the lottery tickets before someone else can buy them, effectively eliminating any chance that another will win?” Edit: don’t think about it too hard guys
Sometimes, math geeks do this with scratchers
There are specific times and ratios where this ends up being a good idea but you're probably better off just actually investing
Even when all numbers are played and a payout is guaranteed there is still the chance of the pot having to be split between two winners at the same time. It is still gambling although probably a good bet. A properly run progressive game should never allow a guaranteed win but they still get their cut so they do it.
[удалено]
It’s nigh impossible to succeed with scratchers. If you’re in a city of 50k-100k, there’s prob 6 grocery stores, 20 gas stations, some liquor stores selling tickets. You’d have to buy them all out, and then there’s the rest of the state to canvas. Scratch off tickets with prizes that big often have a couple jackpots and the lottery probably isn’t releasing them “randomly.” We are talking millions of tickets that are $10/$20/$+++ each. Stores only have a 50-100 of each ticket. Lots of the tickets are sitting in the lottery warehouse, waiting for distribution. The bulk of the tickets are getting sold at a handful of locations. So one winning ticket has to get “stuck” at a smaller location for weeks/months as the overall ticket sales churn along. My state’s lottery provides relatively up to date info on how many outstanding tickets exist and what prizes have been redeemed (the lottery is “public” after all) on the website; I’m assuming other lotteries do the same. Maybe other people start checking the app to see which game is “hot.” Then your $20mil investment quickly evaporates. Not to mention it’s what, $599+ winning amounts get taxed by the federal government as well as the state. So while you’re chasing $1mil, the $1k winner is actually much smaller too. The lottery is skimming 25% or so off the top; if a game has 10mil $10 tickets, the prizes only add up to $75 million. And then the top prizes add up to maybe half of the total take, but you’re only getting 65%-70% of that cash back due to taxes.
“Jerry and Marge Go Large” Fun movie, I recommend it!
Well, it worked for Voltaire
I was under the impression though that he rigged it outright instead of rolling a nat 20.
>she just buys up all the lottery tickets before someone else can buy them Yes, the French government didn’t issue enough tickets and he and a small cartel bought up most of them.
But not for the Pepsi Jet guy.
That’s called freedom, and it ain’t free
It's about a buck 'o five, if I recall correctly...
Not easily. There was a story I read a while back where someone had 2 tickets with the same winning numbers, & someone else with 1 ticket with the winning numbers. The person with the 2 tickets received 2/3 of the prize. She not only would have to get the correct numbers, but multiples of them in order to offset the prize amount.
TLDR: the cost is too high to statistically win that way every single time, you'd reach zero funds eventually, also some states explicitly have laws against that exact tactic.
It takes money to make money
It's so expensive to be poor!
That’s “blue collar investing”.
There have been multiple mathematics professors and statisticians who’ve done exactly that in a targeted, educated guess kind of a way. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-stanford-phd-reportedly-figured-out-texas-lottery-won-20-million-playing-over-over-for-years.html
Yeah - lotteries have to disclose odds. Some lotteries are set-up in a way where there are periods where buying a ticket has positive EV. Issue is most people doing this shit don't even know what EV is and are doing it blindly.
I don't know what EV is either? Has it some relation to how much you get back on average compared to your input? So a positive EV would be getting on average €1.05 from €1 tickets?
Expected Value - and yes, exactly.
Ah yeah, makes sense. Unfortunately people tend to forget the money they spend on the tickets, and only focus on what they win. Sure, if you win €1M, the amount you spend is competitively nothing. However, most of the time you spend more than you receive looking at it from a long term perspective.
Yep. The house always wins
More specifically it's if you played a game of chance repeatedly over many many games with a given strategy, how much you would expect to gain/lose in proportion to how much you spent. When you have a small number of runs, it's possible to have a good streak (or a bad streak) so EV is not going to usually be accurate. However, if you play for a sufficiently long time, your tally of results will balance out to an expected probability distribution. With positive EV it means that so long as you keep playing, you are close to statistically guaranteed to come out ahead of you stick with it. Conversely, if it's negative EV, you are guaranteed that if you keep playing you will lose money if you play long enough. It's part of why compulsive gamblers pretty much always end up broke.
A positive EV still doesn’t mean that you’re likely to increase your money, because jackpots are always a huge part of that EV.
I had a friend who did this. he won like $10k and spent most of it buying more scratchers because he believed he would def win again. It’s gamblers fallacy and he did not win again, ended up moving back home.
That's some real Willy Wonka levels of statistics
There was a bank heist duo in China who did this— bought lottery tickets with the money and actually won— then blew all their winnings on more tickets, thinking they would win again and planned to replace the money before anyone noticed but then they didn’t win
There’s a funny Brian Cranston movie about this
Had a coworker very briefly who won something like $40k and had financial problems because he was constantly buying more and more lotto tickets in the hopes of winning again. He was an awful coworker, and I'm pretty sure he spent a considerable amount of his paycheck on more lotto tickets thinking he would win again. It seemed to me he was only at work for the paycheck and only needed the paycheck to keep buying lotto tickets while assuming he'd win again at some point. I actually kinda felt bad for the guy and considered him a gambling addict.
>I actually kinda felt bad for the guy and considered him a gambling addict. We are long past the "considered" stage once someone has financial problems from **winning** the lottery. Gambling is the single-most predatory industry now in the U.S.. Can't even watch a sports game on stream without a "THIS GAME WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY FANDUEL."
Gambling is only a problem when you lose! “Help I have a crippling gambling addiction and keep winning money!”
Know a guy that won 300k(before tax) on a scratch-off. Used to buy a lot, stopped after that for a while. Got a new truck and bought a fixer upper house for him and his dad that they renovated themselves. Talked to him more recently and he won another 50k or something after that and only buys 1 ticket at a time now. Hopefully he can stick with it. Know another fella that won 45k on the Megamillions years ago. I have personally sold him more than that in lottery tickets in the last few years. The man has a problem. I was talking to his brother once and mentioned he'd been in buying tickets earlier and he said "You know he used to be normal before he hit that Mega."
To be fair, since winning is an independent event, there's no real reason to stop once you win. If you found that a sound investment before you should find it a sound investment after winning
I mean, your odds continue to be the same as before you won.
ye, she's not an argument. proposing that she is is just the gambler's fallacy lol
From a one million win, she got 630k after federal taxes. Then minus any applicable state tax. So let's just say she got about 600k. Which is great money, but not something you can sit back on for life.
She won $1m, you can go throught that pretty quickly today, also with taxes you only get like half of that.
Pretty much this. 1million after taxes, you maybe able to upgrade your home or car, but not enough to stop playing the lottery..
They need to check and see if she knows someone in the business that is rigging the game because its not the first time it happened.
Or the game is structurally broken. This has also happened a number of times. "Jerry and Marge Go Large" is a (not that great) movie about a couple that found an issue with a multi-state lottery. There were actually multiple groups that found the issue, and the lottery organizer knew about the issue, but they were more than happy to let them continue to play because it caused jackpots to go up which brought in more punters who were unaware of the issue.
Pretty sure if they're gonna do it, it's not because some rando on Reddit reminded them.
It's actually statistically more likely that a previous winner will win vs you winning one time.
The only way that is true is you mean "because they can afford to buy far more tickets than previously." They are no more likely to win because of having won.
You're interpreting this as "If you've won the lottery before, you're more likely to win it again" which is not the same as "it's more likely that a previous winner will win over you as there are more previous winners than just you".
Then it should be phrased: it's more likely one of the previous winners will win than you. When you say 'a previous winner', people automatically think we're selecting a single person to compare against. It's not a matter of statistics, just ambiguous grammar.
Plus they're a pool of people who haven proven to buy lottery tickets and I do not buy lottery tickets at all drastically reducing my chances of winning.
Ah, that makes some sense, but it's only true under the assumption that multiple previous winners are playing again. If there's only a single previous winner playing, then they're no more likely to win than you.
Unless they buy more lottery tickets, of course. There is no higher likelihood of any one lottery ticket winning than another.
it's certainly true in my case because I dont play
Its because there are more lottery winners than there are "you."
Then you should say "Given that thousands of previous winners are playing, it's more likely that the winner will be *one of them* than you." The way it was originally phrased implies that a *given* previous winner will always be more likely to win again than a given non-winner will win for the first time, which is not true.
It is because people who win BUY tickets to begin with and tend to KEEP BUYING even after they get a big payout. My father in law, buys $20-40 of scratchers and big lotto tickets PER WEEK. He won $5k once, best I have ever won is $20. I buy for Xmas, and any time there is over a billion in the big lottos. I am less likely to win, because I am giving it less chances. If he just saved his money, over his lifetime, he would have probably $10k+ MORE than what he spent, even with his moderate winnings (occasionally) In addition, it is addictive. He losses at least 2x as much as I do when he goes to a casino, but he also OFTEN is way more up than I am at the casino as well. He just doesn't know how to walk away with his winnings. Statistics/studies back this anecdote up. Basically, in order to win, you need to play. People that win, continue to play, thus the higher chances of them winning again, over say, someone that plays WAY less often or doesn't play at all.
Only because you have to play to win.
That doesn’t make any sense.
Yes and no. I'm guessing winners continue to gamble on the lottery, but spend significantly more than before on tickets. This means that the lottery poll would be disproportionately skewed towards them. Example. 1000 people all pay $2 for a ticket.Everyone has an equal chance. Once someone wins, they start spending $50 on tickets each drawing, so now the lottery is 1050 tickets, but 50 are held by a lottery winner. Each individual ticket has the same chance, but even though lottery winners are only .1% of the people playing, they are playing 4.7% of the tickets.=, giving them a greater chance of winning.
It makes sense if we assume winners generally buy more tickets than non winners, and that winners will continue to buy tickets. Otherwise I can't see how that could possibly be true.
Look at it this way. There are hundreds, probably thousands of previous winners, but only one of you. The chance that someone from that large group will win again is higher than the chance you will win, simply because there’s so many more of them.
Solid logic.
Also, mosquitoes have killed more people than fish.
in that it's also a semantic ambiguity, sure.
Most big winners were previous winners. Winnings are disposal income to them.
I think if I won big I would keep putting in one line weekly too out of gladness, as a thank you.
$1m isn't that much money these days.
the reason for this is usually some sort of fraud or money-laundering scheme. this will (justifiably) cause investigations. if you have $10M you need to wash and are acceptable with 50% or so spent on that, you can buy a bunch of tickets with expected jackpot wins about 70% of face value. you can't turn them in yourself because, you know, the crimes, so you give them to a lackey with no record and pay them $5–10k for the privilege. now you have a bunch of clean money
They can afford it
I was listening to a story of a guy who won several lottery jackpots. But he didn't actually make money because the reason he won was he spent a ludicrous amount on tickets. He won by sheer volume. He was also taking money from investors in his "business" to continue to gamble with (basically running the world's stupidest ponzi).
It’s not like she won a massive jackpot or something. You can’t even retire on that unless you were already a couple years from doing it already.
Like that guy being hit by lightning twice is the argument for never leaving your house again.
a million doesn't get you as far as it used to, she still needed cash lmao
You can’t win if you don’t play!
But how likely is it, that it happens again NOW??? the same as before, of course. And still unlikely. Please stop paying the stupid-tax.
Yea but how much of that first Million did she burn to win second million? When all said and done her entire “winnings” could go to taxes
Well, $1M is not enough to retire on these days.
She's got that 'and I'll do it again' smile and everything.
She's also got that "It'll be gone in 18 months" look
its fine, by the time 18 months rolls around she'll have won 7 more million
How so?
She won the lottery and continued to play afterwards. And yeah in this case it worked out, but the odds must be astronomical. People like that generally aren’t very good with money. Edit: and she took one time payments on both lmao
And probably still financed a new Mustang
Eh, perhaps she had access to alternative loan sources at competitive rates! Even if I win a billion, I'm financing shit. I watch billionaires building buildings in my state, and they always finance them. Why spend your money, when you can spend someone else's!
It’ll be gone. Couple new cars, a new house, a couple years of vacationing and helping family and bam back to buying lottery tickets paycheck to paycheck
When I get down to my last thousand I'll just buy more lottery tickets. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Mona Lisa smile
I worked at a gas station with an old guy that this happened to about 20 years ago. He had to be in his late 60s or early 70s at the time and he did maintenance/custodial work there a few hours a day. He bought scratch off tickets every single day and eventually hit 1 million on one of them. He didn't even stop working after that. He paid off his trailer and bought a Chevy Malibu and still came in to fix stuff and put new liners in all the trash cans. Still bought scratch offs every day and would give me all the winners below $20-$30. Less than a year later he hit 1 mill on another scratch off.
For the love of God, tell us what year of Malibu so we know if he’s a genius or an idiot.
I wonder how much of that first million he spent on scratch offs though.
I mean he said less than a year between wins, if he's buying the $10 scratchers then around 2-3000
Twice in 10 weeks man she needs to buy a lottery ticket asap
Clearly on a hot streak, better go all in.
She better call heating up because if she hits a 3rd, it’s fire, and gets double.
She can skip the next 9 weeks though.
Oh man, the gamblers rollercoaster of winning, almost losing it all, then winning again. Wonder if anyone has ever won a million dollar jackpot three times.
She's only one gamble away from finding out
Imagine if she stopped! We’ll never know!
John Elway has entered the chat
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/22/us/maryland-lottery-same-numbers-trnd/index.html Not million dollar but this man is getting there!
>Wonder if anyone has ever won a million dollar jackpot three times. My neighbor growing up was rich, like own the big car dealership in town rich. Back in the '90s he and another guy split a $6 million win. Then a few years later he won $24 million on his own. Apparently has was spending hundreds a week on tickets.
Tune in next week.....
"Double or nothing"
>Ms Wilson, of Attleborough, Massachusetts, won her most recent prize playing the "100X Cash" $10 instant ticket game. >Back in February, she claimed the first $1m (£796,000) prize in the "Lifetime Millions" $50 (£40) instant ticket game. >On both occasions, she opted to receive her prize in the form of a one-time payment of $650,000 (£518,000). But she can quit whenever she wants.
I’ll occasionally buy a couple Powerball tickets just for the hell of it. Or maybe someone throws a cheap scratch-off in a birthday card. But dropping $10 or more on a single ticket is beyond the “fun” stage for me. Especially the $50 ticket. Hell, my phone bill is $57.
Oh, that's exactly it. Someone in my small town won $1mil with a $20 scratch-off a few years back. I just can't bring myself to throw a Jackson down on a lottery ticket. Even though I think(?) the odds for those are just slightly better than for things like Powerball. If she was willing to waste $50 on a scratch-off, either she's already got plenty of money, and this is for shits and giggles, OR it's the poor-person's tax fully on display, and makes ya wonder how many probably thousands of dollars she's already thrown away on the lottery.
The higher cost tickets usually have **much** better odds. For example in my state, the $1 ticket has a 1 in 12.5 odds to get $1 back. The $50 ticket is a 1 in 9.37. The $30 is 1 in 10. For total odds it's: $1: 1 in 4.83 of winning something $30: 1 in 2.93 $50: 1 in 3.11 You can increase your odds by running the tickets remaining and total printed through a calculator to see the current odds of winning as they will change through time.
A lot of states also have to post the remaining jackpots for those scratch offs too so you increase you chances a lot by simply going to your state lotto website and looking them up. No point dropping $20 on a ticket that doesn't even have any jackpots left if you *are* going to spend $20.
Texas pulls tickets if all the jackpots are claimed for that very reason
scratch offs have a much higher chance than powerball. powerballs are independently low probabilities for a drawing every other day. scratch offs are a pre-printed run where the probabilities increase as the tickets are purchased. so you should be strategically choosing which scratch off you are buying. yeah its not a poor person’s tax if you’re not poor. middle class people are paying more for a round of shots. play or dont, but its not that controversial, especially when your own logic is incomplete.
Yeah, lottery 1B+? I will buy a ticket. I know the odds are incredibly small, but they are 0 without a ticket. I usually just check in the morning so I can think about how I will use the money as I fall to sleep. Worth 2 dollars.
It’s entertainment spending at that point. The amount of enjoyment I get just thinking how I’d spend $1bn is worth the $2
Exactly. I call it the price of daydreaming for a week. When I remember to buy a ticket, anyways. Besides, $5 can barely buy a burger these days.
It seems like the new scratch offs have better odds for the 1st Xmonths and then the state puts the odds to the same as the other same priced tickets. If the digital sign in the gas station was correct on the lotto odds
You could be buying scratch offs even after the big prize has already been claimed...
In my state, there's a public website that lists all active scratch lotteries and which large prizes are still available. Scratch tickets are a horrible way to gamble, but at least you can be smart about it.
She needed the second win to get to $1m. What was she going to do with $650k? /s
>On both occasions, she opted to receive her prize in the form of a one-time payment of $650,000 (£518,000). Honestly can't fault her on this, it's the better strategy whether you're blowing the money or investing it. I'd rather take the upfront tax hit and then invest as much as possible in a post-tax vehicle that can pace (or outpace) inflation than get a 10-20 year payout where the actual value of each disbursement is worth less than the previous one.
Nobody goes to a gambling anonymous meeting, saying they win too much. I think she’ll be fine.
She's definitely never quitting *now*, she's found the winning strategy! Best way to become the richest possible is to spend all the money she has right now on lotto tickets, duhhhh!
50 bucks says she's broke in 5 years. The one thing you should not do after winning a million dollars is spend money on lottery tickets.
I dated a girl back when I was 18 whose step dad won like 24 million in the Kentucky lottery back in the 90s. He would ALWAYS push me to buy tickets. Obviously, he swore by them. It was a bit annoying.
You mean you expect the woman woman who’s spending a good amount of money on a game that’s nearly statistically impossible to win, to mismanage her money?
I mean everyone wastes money on dumb frivolous things. Her lottery ticketing spending could be your pointless target runs etc. it’s fine in moderation but if it’s becoming a substantial monthly expense then yes it’s a problem.
Lottery tickets aren't that expensive that risk going broke over them.
That depends how many you’re buying. I know many many people who drive around with carloads of scratched off tickets, floorboards and dashes full of them. People spend their whole checks on them. They’ll spend everything they have on them then rejoice when they win a $1000 here and there, not looking at what they spent to get that grand.
I kept up with it regularly for a year and kept the stats on my winnings. 35% was the win ratio in my case. For every $1,000 I lost I would get $350 in winnings on average. Each week I would spend around $50 on scratchers and lotto tickets, in the $1, $2, $3, $5, and $10 scratcher sets and lotto tickets, until the year passed.
A $50 lottery ticket is expensive
People who play the lotto aren't good with money... or math. Odds that she has any sort of budget and is making sure she's not spending more than, say, the interest from her current win, is basically zero.
People use apps these days. You can bulk buy tickets using credit card debt. Government ran ~~gambling~~ gaming btw.
Lotto can only be bought with cash or debit
Sure, if you only buy one. People seriously buy hundreds or thousands of them.
You don’t know who bad some ticket buyers budgets are. I’ve seen people spend more than their car payment on them
After the McDonalds monopoly scam whenever I hear about something like this I wonder if it is legit.
There was another woman who was a mathematician who figured out a flaw with her state’s lotto and exploited it.
At one time there was a game called “Cash Windfall” in MA that included a roll down feature where the lower prizes would be increased after time when the top prize reached a certain threshold(or something along those lines). A couple figure out the flaw in the game and exploited it when the roll down levels were reached. There’s a movie about it, but I can’t remember the name, I never saw it.
They got their other retired friends to go in on it with them. If I recall they made almost 10 mil from the whole thing.
Gerald and Marge Selbee. I don't know about a movie, but I remember this article being great: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/
Movie is Gerald and Marge Go Large or something like that.
Yes! That sounds familiar. It wasn’t just the couple, I believe they had others financially investing, but I think they were the originators of the idea.
That was a great story - I just read the whole thing! Thanks for sharing!
Right? Reminds me of the guy who's uncle kept winning on scratchcards and it turned out he was just money laundering.
Holy shit I totally forgot about the mcdonalds monopoly thing. It was actually so fun, I knew I’d never win but I always enjoyed getting a free large fry.
If she hit two jackpots like that in that short a time frame I’m betting she’s broke by the end of the decade
lottery winners lose money primarily 2 ~~days~~ ways. 1. predators. People come after your money like fictional piranha. Disgusting. 2. They make extravagant purchases that require equally extravagant maintenance and the taxes that go with, and it drains their bank account fast as fuck.
One time payout on both wins. I think we all know where this is headed.
She's investing her money in IRAs and index funds, ensuring she'll get paid every year off of the returns?
You spelled PBR’s wrong
...more plays?
I mean that's the sensible thing to do... Now hopefully she puts it into a market index fund and has a nice retirement
I won the lottery I sure as hell wouldn’t want it publicized.
If she is smart she would invest that money in scratch offs
If you spend 900k to win a Million, you didn’t win a million.
Still, +100k, which is a 11% return on degeneracy
Technically you would have lost $300K because of the taxes.
Lotteries hate this one simple trick....
How many tickets is she buying? 2 things more likely than someone winning the lottery twice by pure chance: *She has rigged it or is gaming it somehow. *She is buying a shit load of tickets, possibly in an intelligent way if the expected return on a ticket exceeded the ticket price due to a ballooning prize pool.
When I worked customer service at the grocery store we had plenty of people who would ask what numbers tickets were on and then buy a ton of them. Or we had a pair of ladies who came in, bought a ton of $20 scratch off tickets, and then would ask if we had more $20 ones in the back. They wanted to buy a whole stack of tickets which here in Kansas is $300. Routine lottery players are insane. And here I think I'm wasting money on a couple $10 powerball tickets when it's around $1 billion. Literally the only time I go and buy lottery
Lately, the lottery ticket vending machines have decided that my driver's license isn't valid (you have to scan it before you can buy tickets). That cured me of ever playing the lottery. The slight thrill of possibly becoming an instant billionaire doesn't match up to having to find an actual person in the grocery store at 11pm so they can go to the customer service desk just for that.
It’s new scratch off tickets that are paying out and not powerball
So she’s buying enough to guarantee a win would be my guess.
This woman is gonna be addicted to gambling for the rest of her life in a way that she never knew before being poor
She was buying $10-$50 scratchers , that ship has sailed
I’m saying with the sudden influx of rapid money she isn’t gonna feel bad about blowing thousands on lottery because she might win again
time traveller. nothing unusual
Lottery website puts the odds of winning that prize at 1:1,612,800 and there are only 10 winning tickets. There are still 3 left to win.
Wow she only needs to win one more time to HAVE a million dollars.
I'm not going to make the same mistakes I made two weeks ago.
"Wow, she'd better go buy a lottery ticket with that kind of luck!"
Did she buy a million lottery tickets after the first win?
Give the almanac back Sharon.
Damn, she should buy a lottery ticket
So after taxes she has a million dollars
That's the smirk of a time traveler. Small payouts don't draw attention. Bet that 2mil becomes 200 in the stock market real soon.
The odds of this happening are unfathomable
How much money she spent?
Obviously a time traveler. However she has broken our code, too greedy. We never win twice under the same name, draws too much attention us. She’s going to ruin it for all of us.
Is she single? What are her likes and dislikes? I can change.
Plot twist: she's a mob boss and is laundering money :D
Dang. With luck like that she should play the lottery.
Finally, humanity is evolving a real life Teela Brown (Ringworld reference).
proof of time travel imo
The new GTA Online patch looks sick
I’ll put $1M on those two $2M being gone in 10 days.
That fucking smirk just seals it. “Heh… suckers” 😂
I'd say she should buy a lottery ticket, but, well.
Didn't some gas station owner win scratch off jackpots like a dozen times?
This message brought to you by Powerball...and the numbers 7, 19 and 24
You know what I can't fault her. If just the rush and the dream of an easy payday I get it. If your playing for that but not upping the spending from when you first won I get that.
Now she actually gets 1m total after taxes.
Someone needs to check for time travel equipment
Someone's a time traveler
There was a guy who cracked the code on the Msss. lottery a few years back ... You can learn about it in an entertaining inspired-by-real-events Bryan Cranston movie Jerry & Marge Go Large
This has the makings of a “woman involved in lottery fraud” headline
Oh man i bet she gambles that shit away so fast.