Didn't play that bull****...but only because I forgot.

I didn't win, so it's back to work tomorrow.

On the bright side, I had some really good sushi tonight, so things are looking up !

They say there are two winners. Kinda screws up the odds when you have to split the pot!

i know that i paid the stupidity tax.

i checked my ticket this morning and see that they actually gave me a ticket for the florida lotto instead of the powerball that i requested. :)

All I know is that at a past job one of my coworkers didn't play at his previous job and the office pool ended up winning a big one in California. I played in my office pool every time just in case. It was sort of an interesting way to waste a little of the day talking about it with other coworkers. It is sometimes fun to think what if. And the what if can't happen unless you put that $2 in.

I think Joe-Bob is onto something:

Joe-Bob wrote..

right now in the US, you're free if you have enough money.

I suspect for a lot of people there's simply the allure of freedom. not for sloth, gluttony, or whatever. just freedom and the thought of who else they could free.

There's a lot of people out there who apparently keep a crowbar by their bedside... to pry themselves out of bed so they can then drag themselves to a job they dislike, because they need the paycheck. Winning a lottery would free them from the fetters of the wage-slave.

There's also the pleasure (for most) of daydreaming about what to do with the winnings. I was intrigued by the earlier poster who DIDN'T enjoy that -- definitely a minority view, although one I think I can understand.

The distance between daydreaming and amassing -- from "how would I spend it" to "this is what I need to do in the future to obtain it" and more importantly "this is what I'm doing usefully to obtain it" is a vast chasm which few people manage to cross. I suspect that the participants here who made the jump (or in transit) will tell you that it took/takes diligence and patience, both of which are in short supply.

Tully

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I suspect that the participants here who made the jump (or in transit) will tell you that it took/takes diligence and patience, both of which are in short supply.

I think you have nailed it. Just like most people are followers and a few are leaders, most people don't have the drive and perseverance to find or make their own success. And I think that is OK. Unlike what they seem to teach in schools these days, not everyone can be a winner.

So I'm reading a story about the two winners that will share jackpot and the story says this...

" Each ticketholder is entitled to $294 million, which they can receive in a lump-sum cash payout or in annual payouts over 30 years. Cindy Hill said they'll opt for the lump-sum payout, which totals about $192 million before taxes. "

Okay, so what am I missing here when it comes to the lump sum payment... why the missing 102 million? Shouldn't they get 294 million before taxes?

Soros - present value as "cash" vs future value as annuity

Here's the situation. Gambling is a zero sum game. For every dollar won, there is a dollar lost. The players bring some pot of money 'S' in, and 'S' is what leaves. The game only redistributes that S amongst the players according to random chance (and some degree of skill in some games, like poker). No wealth is created.

There is the concept of "expected value", call it 'E', which is the return you will, on average (law of large numbers) make by playing the game. A "fair game" has E = 0. That is, on average you win as much as you lose, and, again, on average, you walk out with as much money as you came in with. You may win big in one game and lose big in others, but will average out. An example is betting on flipping a coin, for example.

Gambling, for everybody involved, being a zero sum game, must have E = 0. So how come casinos stay in business? Simple. They rig the game so the house has a positive expected value! And since the total is zero sum, that now means the expected value for the suckers coming in now must be negative. They must now, on average, lose rather than breaking even.

And so it is with every form of gambling there is. In Vegas, while it varies from game to game, you can figure E = -0.05. That is, you lose about 5 cents on the dollar. Don Corleone makes a bit more than that with his numbers racket.

But you know who does the best of all? The state-run lotteries, where at *best* is a smidge more than -0.5, meaning you lose 50 cents on the dollar.

The expected value calculation for Powerball gets a wee bit complicated, but it can done by the math whizes. Some erroneously claimed that with the giant jackpot, E was actually positive. They were wrong, making a naive calculation, ignoring taxes and the probability of multiple winners. At best, Powerball has a maximum E of about 52.5 cents on the dollar, and sometimes it is as low as 20 cents on the dollar.

Here is what Powerball does. You get a bunch of poor idiots to cough up money into a pot. Goverment and the lottery company comes in and takes half or better of that pot. It then gives the other half to one or two of the suckers.

It's one of the oldest scams in the book. You are playing on the ignorance, desperation, and false of hope of the poorest amongst us.

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Some erroneously claimed that with the giant jackpot, E was actually positive. They were wrong, making a naive calculation, ignoring taxes and the probability of multiple winners. At best, Powerball has a maximum E of about 52.5 cents on the dollar, and sometimes it is as low as 20 cents on the dollar.

At best? A "math whiz" would tell you that E (the expected value of the next ticket sold) scales in a linear fashion with the size of the jackpot, assuming the number of tickets purchased (and therefore, the expected number of winners) remains static. In other words, a $1B jackpot has E twice as large as a $500M jackpot, assuming the same crazy-large number of people buy tickets for each pool. As the size of the jackpot increases, E will eventually become positive. And when it does, it's still stupid tax.

Like I said, naive calculations. E does not scale linearly with jackpot size because the number of tickets purchased is a function of jackpot size and the probability of multiple winners increases with the number of players. Here's the correct E calculation:

http://www.circlemud.org/~jelson/megamil....

E for Powerball peaks at a jackpot size of $463M, at which point is a little over $1.05 for a $2 ticket.

He updated that page today, with the latest ticket sales numbers which updated his "turnout" model of ticket sales vs advertised jackpot size. The new numbers pushed the peak up to $493M, but lowered the whole expected value curve as it spread it out.

The actual E for this Powerball drawing was 83 cents. On a $2 ticket.