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