Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The continued existence of lotteries demonstrates how little intuition humans have about probability. On some level, we all know that the chances of winning a life-changing win are practically zero, but many people buy tickets every week, because you never know, you might get lucky, right? RIGHT??
No.
If you want a really good demonstration of why lottery ticket purchases are essentially a voluntary tax, look no further than a site called “Lottery Every Second,” which, as the name suggests, simulates play the lottery every second. Or, more precisely, it simulates the game two lotteries every second: Powerball, one of the most popular games of this type in the United States, and EuroJackpot, a similar game that operates throughout Europe.
The games work in a broadly similar way. Power Ball requires you to select five numbers between 1 and 69 (nice!) and a sixth between 1 and 26. To win a jackpot, all six must match those chosen at random in a given drawing. EuroJackpot uses five numbers between 1 and 50 and two other numbers between 1 and 12; Again, to win a jackpot, all the numbers you choose must match those drawn.
It is quite simple to calculate the odds yourself: in the case of Powerball, you have a one in 69 chance of correctly selecting each of the first five numbers, and a one in 26 chance with the sixth. To get the chance to get all six correct, simply multiply the individual odds together, giving you a 1 in 292,201,338 chance of hitting the jackpot. As always, the Europeans get a better deal, with a 1 in 139,838,160 chance.
That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Well, here’s the problem: as Lottery Every Second’s accompanying text points out: “These numbers are so big that they no longer make sense to our brains.” The site aims to solve this problem by demonstrating exactly what these probabilities mean in reality. He explains that on average, you would have to sit and watch every second play for just over two years to see a EuroJackpot jackpot, and four and a half years to see a Powerball jackpot. And, as the site points out, it’s with a draw every second; if you buy a weekly ticket, then “you would have to play Powerball for approximately 5.6 million years to have a 50% chance of winning once.”
The other thing the site demonstrates is how much money these games make for their operators. The simulation keeps a running total of wins and losses, and despite the fact that, at first glance, EuroJackpot appears to be a much better deal than Powerball, in both cases the amount of money paid out is around an eighth of the amount received. In other words, for every $100 either operator pays, they pocket around $800. It’s literally money for nothing.
Hopefully seeing the absurd numbers that characterize lottery odds presented like this will motivate a few people to stop buying weekly tickets. But humans are not purely rational beings. We’re motivated by things like hope, impulse, and despair, and unfortunately, we’re also very bad at assessing probabilities. So if you continue to play Powerball anyway, we’re not going to judge you, but if you’re lucky, just be careful on the way home after collecting your winnings. You could very well be struck by lightning or hit by a falling piano.
