# To play the lottery or not?

1. Jul 22, 2010

### Fragment

Yes, probability gives you laughable chances at winning. However, what about all the stories where one person plays for the first time and hits a goldmine? Is it worth it to play occasionally? Often? Very seldom? Never? Thoughts anyone?

2. Jul 22, 2010

### lisab

Staff Emeritus
Whether you play or not, your chances of winning are veeeery close to the same. So if you have more dollars than sense, sure why not?

I think of it as a tax on people who are bad at math.

3. Jul 22, 2010

### Fragment

Are you saying that there is absolutely no point? There will be a set of possible winners and loser, and among that set, a few will be picked. Therefore, is it pointless to include oneself in that set, seeing as you could never be picked if you never were part of the set to begin with?

4. Jul 22, 2010

### lisab

Staff Emeritus
What I mean is, the chance of winning is basically the same, whether you buy a ticket or not. That people get sucked into thinking "But it could be me this week!" is a sad sign that most people really, really don't understand statistics.

5. Jul 22, 2010

### Fragment

I understand that. My only concern is that the return (if any) on lotteries is fair if you play very few times and win. If one does not win after a few times, then one should stop playing. There is very little work involved into playing the lottery, and therefore not all that much to lose, assuming you acknowledge that your money is lost. Is it still unwise to play? (This springs from a personal debate with someone, I'm trying to find rational counters for what that person might say.)

6. Jul 22, 2010

### Office_Shredder

Staff Emeritus
If you buy just a couple lottery tickets, the expected change in money afterward is going to be losing about a couple of bucks. There's no beginner's luck or just buy a couple to keep your losses low strategy that is going to make playing the lottery worth it from a dollars perspective.

What people lose sight of is that a dollar really doesn't matter. If I lost a dollar right now my life would not change one bit. So why not spend that dollar giving myself a .00000000000001% chance of having a life-altering amount of money come my way? In this sense you can argue buying one or two lottery tickets makes sense

7. Jul 22, 2010

### waht

Buying a lottery ticket once in a while just for fun only might be OK.

The problem becomes with chronic gamblers who are hooked gambling. I know someone who used to spend $50 a week on lottery tickets. I was driving with him one time, and he told me to pull in the gas station. I thought he just wanted to get something to drink, or use the bathroom. But instead, he came back with a bundle of lottery tickets. 8. Jul 22, 2010 ### Jimmy Snyder With each lottery comes a story where one person plays and wins. So what. 9. Jul 22, 2010 ### anubis01 I actually just bought my first lottery ticket today, and this is coming from someone who never plays the lottery due to "statistics". Basically playing the lottery continuously every week is a bad move. However, when the jackpot gets to ridiculously high portions (50 million for supermax this Friday) than it would be worth it to play. Even if its statically improbable,$6 for a chance to win a double digit million dollar prize is worth it.

10. Jul 22, 2010

As lisab said, its a tax on people who are bad at math and statistics.

The monetary value of playing a game of chance is easy to calculate, for each instance of playing the game you multiply the amount you could win by the probability of winning and the amount you could lose by the probability of losing.

Right now California's super lotto plus has a jackpot of 12,000,000 and the odds of winning are 1/41416353. So the monetary value of playing that game is : (12,000,000)*(1/41416353) + (-1)(41416352/41416353) ~ -0.71. So the game costs your 71 cents per play. There is no financial reason to play such a game, so you shouldn't think to play it for the chance of winning rather than the fun of playing. Of course the fun of playing is directly tied to the monetary value so, so there is no point in playing for the fun either. Its a thrill based off of a deception, a deception that is only possible is one is unable or unwilling to look at the math.

Id rather do drugs personally.

11. Jul 22, 2010

To expand a little further... Using that simple algebra to determine the monetary value of something is applicable to many things that are random like gambling. For example, warranties and insurance. Salesman wants to sell you an extended warranty on your phone? Think about how many times you have lost/broken your phone that would qualify for the extended warranty over the years. Multiply that probability by the money you would save with the warranty and add it to the cost of the warranty times the probability the phone doesnt break. Nearly every time you will see the answer is negative, that is you lost money by buying the warranty. Same thing with insurance, if you can get yourself capable of selfinsuring you will do better to payout to yourself (even if it is painful) rather than paying every month to an insurance company. For example, full coverage insurance on my car costs the same as the cars value every year. That means to be worth it I would have to expect to get my car stolen/totaled every year. Yea right! I self insure and get richer each and every month.

That is how rich people actually get rich, by following the math rather than purposefully ignoring it for a thrill.

12. Jul 22, 2010

### cronxeh

Everytime I think of lottery I remember how Giacomo Casanova used to make a killing selling those lottery tickets to all those idiots who would buy them :rofl:

Truly, stupidity has evolved over the centuries into an international pasttime

13. Jul 22, 2010

I enjoy a scratcher every once in a while. Maybe once every 2 months, but its just for yucks. I won $19 the first scratcher I played, and since I've won 4 dollars and a free ticket, in about 20 tickets bought in my lifetime (maybe less). 14. Jul 22, 2010 ### Pengwuino I think it all has to do with "worth it". If your quality of life takes a hit that is more than how much your quality of life would increase "multiplied" by the probability you will actually win the lottery, it's not worth it. Now to make such a consideration, you have to realize what that money could be used for! I remember hearing that the average american adult spends a couple hundred bucks on some form of gambling per year. Now, instead of throwing that money away, why not save it? That's easily tens of thousands of dollars saved over a lifetime that you actually get to use instead of the slim to nothing chance you might win the lottery, even if you played for decades! 15. Jul 22, 2010 ### collinsmark I once programmed up an artificial neural network (in C++) to calculate "winning" lottery numbers based on my personal incorrect numbers. My premise (which I didn't take seriously myself, even at the time -- but I found amusing to tell people) was that "my picks are not just wrong, but so completely wrong, that there must be a correlation!" Each week I would buy a$1 lottery ticket, then later record the winning numbers for that week, once the actual winning numbers were drawn.

Then I would train the neural network based on all my incorrect picks and all the corresponding winning numbers. The neural network always converged well. After training it would always predict the correct corresponding winning number set for any given previous incorrect pick. And each week I had a new data point for the training set, so I would retrain it weekly.

The goal was that eventually, I would purchase a new 1$lottery ticket as usual, enter it into the neural network, and let it predict the winning number set. Then I would go back and purchase a second lottery ticket using the predicted number set, before the drawing. Unfortunately, (and I suppose I should have known this) no matter how large the training set got, the neural network would always predict an exact copy of a set of previous winning numbers, no matter how random the inputs were. In other words, if my training set had 100 different "original pick"-"winning set" combinations, when put to the test it would seem to limit itself to predicting a "winning set" from one of only those 100. (And it trained itself to do this -- there was nothing in the algorithms that would explicitly force this behavior.) Eventually California changed the way it's lottery was played, and I stopped after that. But I don't consider any of it a waste of time or money. I wasn't actually expecting to win. It was more of an excuse to create and play around with an artificial neural network. That was fun. <I'm such a nerd sometimes> [Edit: the moral of the story is every time I see someone buying a lottery ticket, I figure they're testing out their artificial neural network.] Last edited: Jul 22, 2010 16. Jul 22, 2010 ### ZQrn The usual maths behind this always makes the strange assumption that one's gain by winning 10x is always 10 times higher than one's gain by winning x. For one, it can easily be shown that this is not true, say that you win more than you can spend in your entire life, if you win that, or 10 times at much, it makes no difference yes? Also, people are bad at fathoming large numbers, say I give you 10 EUR, you're like 'nice', say I give you 100 you're like 'cool' say I have you 1000 you're like 'Wow, awesome, just for nothing?'. Okay, say I give you 100 000 000, you're like 'WTF? OMFGZ!!!', if I give you a hundred times more than that, your reaction is about the same. And that's why you can't apply maths to this in general cases, because each individual's gain and loss is completely different with receiving and losing these numbers. 17. Jul 23, 2010 ### collinsmark Perhaps there's some truth to that. But don't forget that in most lotteries the majority of the proceeds (after winnings) supplement funding for schools, education, etc. (And hopefully math education too. :tongue2:). So it's for a good cause (mostly). There are other ways to donate money too. But supplementing education funds isn't all that bad. 18. Jul 23, 2010 ### Academic Id rather avoid the self deception and donate to education directly. I actually donated$10 to a teacher this morning which is not something I normally do. Much better than buying 10 lottery tickets.

19. Jul 23, 2010

### xxChrisxx

So basically what you are saying is you programmed something to suffer from gamblers fallacy.

20. Jul 23, 2010

### Danger

I just stumbled across this thread in a drunken stupor whilst trying to sniff out where Greg keeps his porn. I have therefore satisfied neither my curiosity nor my libido. In lieu of physical satisfaction, I will post herewith a saying that was popular in my crowd when 649 first gained existence: People who don't understand math buy lottery tickets.