Good call. Probably the biggest loser is the lottery winner, when their life gets turned upside down. "now everything's a little upside down; as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped. What's good is bad. What's bad is good. You'll find out when you reach the top....you're on the bottom"
Nevada?..... ?.... ! ....Are you sure they're waiting to buy lottery tickets or is that a whorehouse? :eek:
Interestingly, the 2 winners got exactly as much as their odds were: "Two tickets matched all six numbers in the huge Mega Millions US lottery, and will split the estimated 355 million dollar jackpot, lottery officials said Wednesday. The January 4 drawing yielded two winning tickets, purchased in the western US states of Idaho and Washington, lottery officials said. The huge jackpot was one of the biggest in US history. Lottery officials said before Tuesday night's drawing that the odds of purchasing a winning ticket was about one in 176 million." Playing all variations still would have paid off.
1) A lottery "arb"? 2) You have to take into account the possiblity of 3, 4, 5 and even 10 winners into account. :eek: 3) If you take into account what the states take out for themselves, how much money, overall, went into that drawing? $500-million? 600?, 700? :eek:
It actually happened in Virginia I think in the 90s, that the number of variations were rather low and a few dozens people bought enough tickets making sure that they had most likely the winning ticket, which they had. The lottery company took them to court, saying that this is supposed to be a random game, but since there was nothing in the rulebook against buying all tickets, they were rewarded the prize. Since this happened, I assume most lottery company have it in their rules that group ticket buying targeting all variations is not allowed... OK, here is the story, they were an Australian syndicate: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink The number of combinations was 7 million but the pay off was 27 million. As long as the group can pull off buying all the tickets in time, it was a nobrainer... "The biggest danger to a huge lottery investor would be having to split the prize with other winners who had picked the same numbers. Mr. Thorson said some popular combinations have as many as 1,000 ticket holders." Another case in FL: "The previous record may have been held by a computer engineer who bought 80,000 tickets in October from a Jacksonville, Fla., bar called Smitty's Place. The bar owner said the man made a profit but did not win the $94 million jackpot. People in Jacksonville still call him "The Phantom.""
1) If too many "astute" players get the same "idea", you'll have many, multiple, winners. They will barely "profit" from the money of the piker-players when you take into account the time and effort needed to acquire all of the tickets/numbers. They would be paying a dollar and only getting a "dollar and some pennies" back. 2) States should not discourage that type of participation for that very reason.