Retirement calculator!

[41magsnub]

http://powerballsim.appspot.com/

What is your ROI?  Over the course of now 150 years, I get 9 cents back on every dollar spent.

[vaskidmark]

Is there supposed to be a link?

stay safel

[41magsnub]

fixed

[Ben]

$0.06 in 500 games. Woohoo!

[Monkeyleg]

Fun game.

I was thinking recently about how the powerball system works. It's my understanding that they try to randomize the winning tickets, so that one state or area doesn't get a disproportionate number of winners.

If that's the case, wouldn't they need to have the drawing before shipping the tickets?

[Fly320s]

Fun game.

I was thinking recently about how the powerball system works. It's my understanding that they try to randomize the winning tickets, so that one state or area doesn't get a disproportionate number of winners.

If that's the case, wouldn't they need to have the drawing before shipping the tickets?

Maybe you mean the scratch-off tickets?

[Monkeyleg]

Maybe you mean the scratch-off tickets?

Maybe. There's a woman who won several lotteries, and won several million dollars. Odds were in the trillions of doing what she did.  She had a Phd in mathematics from Stanford or some school like that. They eventually got her on some charges, but a theory I'd read was that she'd figured out the algorithm for the shipping of the tickets. She would do things such as buy all of the tickets from one store, or get the owner to stop selling tickets at a certain point.

[Phantom Warrior]

After the AP test my high school AP Calculus teacher taught us how to calculate expected outcomes for lottery tickets.  (Exactly what this is.)  I've never looked at a lottery ticket twice since.

[HankB]

Right now, the estimated Powerball jackpot for the cash value option is $250,000,000 - comparable to the odds against winning - so if I get to the store before the next drawing, I'll risk a couple of bucks.

Of course, it'll be just my luck to hit the jackpot and have to share it with someone, since as jackpots rise, so do the odds of multiple winning tickets being sold . . .

[Fly320s]

Right now, the estimated Powerball jackpot for the cash value option is $250,000,000 - comparable to the odds against winning - so if I get to the store before the next drawing, I'll risk a couple of bucks.

Of course, it'll be just my luck to hit the jackpot and have to share it with someone, since as jackpots rise, so do the odds of multiple winning tickets being sold . . .

Yeah, that would be a damn shame having to settle for $125,000,000.   

[41magsnub]

Yeah, that would be a damn shame having to settle for $125,000,000.   

Minus half for taking a lump sum, then a bunch of taxes.  But yeah, he'd be ok :)

[brimic]

After playing for 125 years, I got a $0.08/$1.00 return on investment.
If I were 20 years younger, that kind of return would probably beat the heck out of socialist security!

[BobR]

I let it run for 2000 years, both random and picked numbers.

The random gave 8 cents return on a dollar and the picked gave 7 cents. But I guess that is better than setting my money on fire, barely.

bob

[RevDisk]

I put an amount significantly more than a hundred bucks per month into retirement or investments. That said, there's a department lotto pool. I toss in a couple bucks, for entertainment. Yep, only slightly better than setting your money on fire. But if taken as strictly entertainment and used in very moderate amounts, no harm. Same with going to a casino.

People 'relying' on winning the lotto should NOT buy any lotto or scratch off tickets. It's basically a tax on people that can't do math.

[Northwoods]

Saw a guy one time buying $900 (at least) in lotto tickets.  While I suppose that could have been a work pool that he was buying for, based on my observations that probably wasn't the case.  Also, unless he just liked to dress that way anyway, he certainly didn't look like the type that afford to blow $900.

The thing about the lottery is that if you take the average amount spent monthly by regular lottery players and invested that in a good diversified portfolio of mutual funds (or heck even an S&P 500 index fund) they'd become a millionaire EVERY TIME.  Not 1:174million odds.  174million:174million odds.