The Lottery is Rigged, Right?

It is designed to be hard to win so the pot gets bigger. It is a feature, not a bug. Eventually, some person(s) will win, so it is not rigged by any real definition.

I just saw this yesterday, OP

Firewall, R2. How are they manipulating the odds?

They tweaked it to make it harder to win

[quote]Here's how Mega Millions used to work: Players picked five numbers from 1 to 75 and a Mega number from 1 to 15. The odds of winning the top prize were 1 in 258,890,850. Since Mega Millions modified the formula, players now pick five numbers from 1 to 70 and a Mega number of 1 to 25. The odds of winning the jackpot are now 1 in 302,575,350.

Bigger pots are good for business.

Good to know.

So [insert usual disclaimer about how none of us are ever going win], what's the best strategy? To buy an occasional ticket for a smaller lottery, like Cash4Life?

Google tells me the odds of winning a cash4life drawing is 1 in 21,846,048

So yes, your odds of winning that lottery are higher. Though realistically, those of are course very small odds either way.

An acquaintance of my uncle is one of the people who runs the servers. It is in no way rigged. They keep shit so tight she is audited every single year. On top of that, the administrators who run the lottery investigates where she lives, the car she drives, her bank accounts, everything. It isn't just her, but anyone high up in the operations have their assholes constantly sniffed for financial "irregularities" re: purchases outside what their salary could normally provide.

It's not rigged. There are just 302 million separate combinations of numbers and only one will win. That's much higher than powerball, and powerball gets up there fairly often too because nobody wins. Even now I think it's 450 mil or so.

There are actually people and websites, that keep track of numbers drawn to see if there are patterns.

In Pennsylvania, three men were convicted of rigging the balls for that states lottery and they got caught because of people like that. There were patterns after a while that shouldn't be there.

The thing people forget about is odds don't tell you what WILL happen, they tell you what is likely to happen. For instance, if you toss a coin there is a 1 in 2 chance it will come up heads. If you flip the coin 100 times it should come up heads 50 times and tails 50 times, but there is nothing to say it HAS to. It can be totally fair and come up heads 100 times, it just isn't LIKELY to do that.

I'm not sure if this would be accurate, but if I told you to guess a number between 1 and 302,000,000 - and you got it right - would that be equivalent to winning powerball?

I took probability class so long ago - and so many assumptions I had going into it were wrong (especially about independent events, which each ball is I think)... it was a really interesting class but one of those things you forget a few months after the final exam, unless you use it.

I'm suspicious of people who win the lotteries mutliple times. They're out there; you can google it.