This website plays the lottery every second to show why you'll (almost certainly) never win big

[midian182]

Winners & losers: Most people understand that the odds of winning a lottery jackpot are millions to one, but as the saying goes, "somebody has to win it." While that's technically true, a new website illustrates just how unlikely it is to be you – by playing two lotteries simultaneously every second.

The Lottery Every Second website simulates draws for the US Powerball and the EuroJackpot, which is played in 18 European countries.

A lot of people play these lotteries, but the odds of hitting the jackpot in the Powerball are 292.2 million to one. That's about the same odds of being born with identical quadruplets, or randomly guessing a 28-bit binary number correctly on the first try.

Also read: How a secret gambling syndicate won a $95 million Texas lottery by buying every number combination

The EuroJackpot's odds are slightly better at 139.8 million to one. That's close to the odds of flipping a coin and getting heads 27 times in a row.

The site has been simulating these lotteries every second, with new numbers and "official" draw results, for just over three days now – you can even add your own numbers to see if your picks are lucky.

So far, the simulated Powerball lottery has generated $142,900 in winnings. Unfortunately, those $2 tickets have added up to just over $1 million spent, equalling a loss of around $950,000 at the time of writing.

The EuroJackpot is pretty much the same story: after spending almost 1.1 million euros ($1.28 million) on tickets, the winnings have added up to 132,423 euros ($154,154), equalling a loss of 960,550 euros ($1.11 million).

The question, then, is how long would it take playing these lotteries every single second to hit their respective jackpots? In the case of the Powerball, around 4.6 years. The EuroJackpot takes a slightly better 2.2 years of non-stop, every-second play to potentially win the biggest prize.

Nobody is going to buy a new ticket every second, of course, but what about those of us who play every week? You'd need to play Powerball weekly for about 5.6 million years to have a 50% chance of winning once.

The website's headline of "Why wait a week for disappointment when you can have it every second?" really illustrates the madness of lotteries and how some have named them a tax on the poor and desperate.

Like many things, though, playing the lottery can be a bit of fun – most of us like to imagine what we'd do with the money if we won big. But as with other forms of gambling, it's only enjoyable as long you don't become addicted or obsessed – and you understand there's almost zero chance of becoming a multi-millionaire this way.

Image credit (center): Waldemar Brandt

Permalink to story:

This website plays the lottery every second to show why you'll (almost certainly) never win big

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Lotteries are a tax on the poor.

But they are a completely voluntary tax.

In the US, a portion of the optional lotto tax goes to university scholarships, so the bad at math poor help the smart poor kids. Pretty poetic really.

(The scholarship portion should be greater but generally one of the better taxes)

 

[NicktheWVAHick]

Isn’t this already obvious with hundreds of
Millions of combinations played every cycle and $1.8 billion jackpots growing over 4-6 month periods with no winner?
What I find more interesting (and suicide-provoking) is the number of winners each cycle that are only one number off…..

 

[unoficialoficial]

A small analysis. Human DNA has evolved around hunting. This means that in an open, variable space, it tries to identify and catch something that is trying to escape. Consequently, it doesn't like monotonous, closed, constrained spaces; instead, it prefers open, variable spaces. In an abstract sense, low possibilities represent a constraint and a monotonous space, which human DNA naturally dislikes. Therefore, there is a tendency to transform that space by expanding it into an open, variable one, that is the “winning event”. Selling of (practically worthless) lottery tickets involves riding that wave of human DNA's tendency.

The same rebellious tendency(of overcoming constrains) also drives many other things, such as scientific progress. Laws fight that rebellious nature of the human for the purpose of increasing the density of the population, but they make the individual units of the population less capable of progress. By definition, if you regulate something, you don't allow it to be self-expressed; thus, it is neutralized. Maybe its self-expression net total is harmful (negative) in a high-density population, but maybe not. The quantity of regulation a populations demand’s to be able to function represents it’s efficiency. If a population can function with minimum regulation compare to others, it’s an advantage. If they insert artificial regulations into a population without justified grounded solid reasons, that is a crime against humanity because they minimize it’s potential for progress.

 

[passwordistaco]

 

[Steveb8189]

"While most Americans don't officially list it as a plan, surveys show a significant minority, around 18-21% of all adults, and even higher for millennials (around 39-60%), view winning the lottery as a plausible way to fund retirement, reflecting widespread financial insecurity and a lack of traditional savings, according to various studies from 2006-2019. "

I remember reading this a while ago and thinking how scary it is.