What, really, are people’s chances of winning this weeks 260 million jackpot? This infographic relates the odds are not so good nor are they in your favor. Lottery wins are ultra-rare, and often disastrous—many winners lose friends and family, or go overboard and quickly end up in debt. And by investment-to-return ratio, lottery tickets are one of the worst investments on the planet and the odds are almost 88% that in a given Powerball drawing, no one will win.
So why do people buy lottery tickets? Well, for one thing, a jackpot’s size operates like a feedback loop: it gets bigger, so more people buy tickets, so it gets bigger, so more people buy tickets, so it gets bigger…until someone wins and lives happily ever after, or doesn’t. For another, many people believe purchasing tickets often, or in bunches, substantially increases their chances of eventually winning the lottery. It doesn’t. Even if purchasing 195,249,054 tickets over a lifetime guaranteed a jackpot win (which it doesn’t), that lifetime would have to be very long, or the buyer very rich to begin with:
- Buying two tickets a week, one for every Powerball drawing? Make sure you live 1,877,366 years.
- If that’s out of the question, simply buy 47,000 tickets every week for 80 years.
And buying more than one ticket for a single drawing will mathematically improve your odds, but they will still be so long that the effect will really be to drain your wallet.
Which reminds me, I need to go out and buy a couple of tickets – you never know and you can’t win unless you play!
