$340 Million Powerball

Odds of winning a BIG lottery: 1:308,000,000

Wrong.

Odds of winning a BIG lottery if you purchase one ticket in your
lifetime: 1:308,000,000

Assuming a lifespan of 80 years, purchasing one ticket every day, the
odds of winning go up to something like 1:10,000. Now that's not so
bad, is it?

Jose
--
Money: what you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Jose writes:

Odds of winning a BIG lottery: 1:308,000,000

Wrong.

Odds of winning a BIG lottery if you purchase one ticket in your
lifetime: 1:308,000,000

Thought one ticket was 1:80,000,000; but their site says that as of
6-April it's 1:146,100,000 (and it wasn't what I said even before
that). They apparently added two more white ball numbers, so now
there are 55 white balls. 5 are drawn, so the odds of drawing any
given set of numbers should be 55-Choose-5 * 42, or 3,478,761 * 42,
or...hey, I got the same number they did! 146.1e6 ("55-Choose-5"
being my text representation of the big-C notation used in math for
combinations.)

Or is this more to the tune of "87.5% of all statistics are made up on
the spot"?

(Note that for figuring *financial* odds, you have to somehow include
the odds of multiple people holding the winning number, hence
splitting the jackpot. Especially on these mega-jackpots, that's
quite likely.)
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/
Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/

Or is this more to the tune of "87.5% of all statistics are made up on
the spot"?

Yes, and the other 43.9% of them were made up long ago and therefore not
subject to question.

Jose
--
Money: what you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Odds of winning a BIG lottery if you purchase one ticket in your lifetime:
1:308,000,000

Assuming a lifespan of 80 years, purchasing one ticket every day, the odds
of winning go up to something like 1:10,000. Now that's not so bad, is
it?

Jose
--
Jose, I think you may be wrong about the odds. If you buy a ticket every
day, the odds are the same each day 1:308,000,000. If you buy 10 tickets
each day the odds for each ticket to win is still the same.
I think.
Dale

Jose, I think you may be wrong about the odds. If you buy a ticket every
day, the odds are the same each day 1:308,000,000. If you buy 10 tickets
each day the odds for each ticket to win is still the same.

You are right inasmuch as the odds are the same every day (not counting
the different number of people that buy tickets for any given game).
However, the more tickets you buy, the more your =overall= chance of
winning at =least= one game. For tiny chances, the increase is roughly
linear (there's such a small chance of winning more than once it can be
ignored).

Jose
--
Money: what you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.