According to math, it's not worth risking $2 to play for the $800 million Powerball jackpot

[AF-Roger]

The Powerball lottery drawing for Saturday evening has hit a record-high estimated jackpot prize that was$800 million as of this writing, after no one won the jackpot in Wednesday's drawing.

While that's a huge amount of money, buying a ticket is still probably a losing proposition.

Consider the expected value
When trying to evaluate the outcome of a risky, probabilistic event like the lottery, one of the first things to look at is expected value. The expected value of a randomly decided process is found by taking all of the possible outcomes of the process, multiplying each outcome by its probability, and adding all of these numbers up. This gives us a long-run average value for our random process.

Expected value is helpful for assessing gambling outcomes. If my expected value for playing the game, based on the cost of playing and the probabilities of winning different prizes, is positive, then in the long run the game will make me money. If expected value is negative, then this game is a net loser for me.

Read more According to math, it's not worth risking $2 to play for the $800 million Powerball jackpot

 

[Dr. Forum]

I just love the way you are handling the whole issue of gambling and winning the jackpot. I love how you are making the calculation just to be sure that the thing you are doing wont come to haunt you. I am not a gambler but i do think this is always the way to go. Being able to analyze everything with probability so that you are able to identify the areas tat are worth your investment. I think if every gambler could go o and implement this, then very few will be loosing on their bets.

 

[azgold]

They say that you have a better chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery.

Still, it's only $2 and somebody's gotta win.

We don't have Powerball here in Canada but we have lots of others. I have known a couple of people who won (far) less than the big jackpot. Nice thing about our lotteries is that they are tax-free.

 

[JH1nz]

Yeah, a few other things here too: While odds of winning the powerball jackpot are slim, there are other ways to win at powerball in which are a lot more favorable. I wouldn't mind winning a few thousand!
Also, state-specific run lotteries offer better odds of winning because obviously there are less people that are allowed to play however the jackpot is significantly less. My state's avg jackpot is around 1.5 mil. I'd take that too!!

 

[Doodles67]

Playing the lottery and expecting to win the jackpot is unrealistic; however, many people do win small amounts of money. I consider buying a Powerball ticket as a voluntary tax. If I wanted to gamble, I would buy a raffle ticket because the odds are considerably better.