Hi,
I'm interested to find out how many people on here enter the lottery? How often do you enter the draws? Which lottery game is the best and why? How much do you spend? How much have you won? Do you choose your own numbers or is it system generated?
I have purchased 2 Powerball tickets since I have been in Australia. However, just last week someone I know won $27,000 on the lottery at a cost of $60 to enter for that week.
@paulsterio: "actual applied probability" isn't really probability. It's psychology. The probability doesn't change, which is why I think playing lotto is stupid if you were to gamble.
Speaking of psychology, back in the day I sneakily enjoyed watching psych students cry their way through second year statistics.
@paulsterio: I think I can understand your point. Risk is a function of loss and gain. If the loss is so low as to be worthless then huge odds can apply. I don't think this really applies for lotto - having seen how much people spend on it week on week, but I can see how it applies to dollar games; pokies probably fall under this.
@macrocephalic: Yep, that's exactly what I mean. $1 is so worthless to some people that they probably wouldn't even bother picking it up if they dropped it or they'd just throw it into some coin box at home and just lose it. For those sorts of people, it's better to spend it on lottery or even pokies than to just throw it somewhere.
If I were to ever play the lotto it would be for the fantasy and conversation fodder it would provide while drinking with my friends. Now if I had the winning ticket that would be a whole different power…ball game.
I think I've bought about 3 tickets in the past five years, probably when the jackpot was $80m or something. I reasoned that the expected value was positive, so therefore it would be irrational not to enter. And as an economist I wouldn't want to be accused of being irrational haha.
Funny thing about the bigger jackpots. In the USA (with the recent $1.5 billion jackpot), they actually changed the odds on their lotto products to encourage bigger jackpots, probably to reel in people like me. So in aggregate people are less likely to win anything, but the headline number is much bigger. Powerball in the USA is with 69 balls + 26 powerballs, here it's 40 + 20 powerballs. The odds are 1/292m vs 1/76m.
I've also considered this but jackpots are shared, so your expected returns also have a chance of being split many ways.
Still irrational to enter :)
I play the Powerball every single week and use the same numbers. The interest I earn on an investment pays for it.
There are 6 six lines in each of my tickets.
I purchase my tickets on line and one week I threw $50 on and I was winning and losing bu kept the account with $50 for 3 months. Then lost it in one hit by yeh had a good roll fr a while.
Wednesday Gold Lotto was the best option for me when I looked into it. Best odds and likely to get the full 1 million if you do win 1st div. Chances are you will not win and should instead learn stock trading. I never ended up playing regularly.
I bought $20 worth of scratchies once. Won $22.50ish from it. Never bought lottery bull again.
Outside of major winners, you'd be in the large minority of people to make a profit off it. Nice work for quitting when you're ahead.
I play occasionally. Once i won $400 2 days before my birthday, so i looked up at god and said thanks mate! I know a couple of people who won 2-4million. L
I play when I think of it and the prize is up over $30 million (that's the minimum I need to do what I really want- family compound pay off other people's mortgages etc) random numbers and unregistered so the lotto people can't track me.
While I know the chances are miniscule it's nice to dream.
Not sure if I'm going to quit work via a sky writer or flash mob.
Both my Aunty and my husband's uncle have won the major prize in the jackpot lottery and a man from my hometown won powerball and oz lotto (major prize but it was only the basic million amount or so ) so it does happen.
One of my friends won the $150k jackpot on the scratchie where you had to get from one side to the other.
I just spend my money on good food with the odd scratchie thrown in.
You can end up with a small fortune from gambling if you start with a large one.
the chance of winning the first prize is 50%
why?
It is either you won, or you don't.
agreed?
I note down my lottery spend & keep it just under $100/year.
Very rarely win but it's nice to dream …
Give me $100 a year and you can dream I will give you a million one day, just dream :)
Give me $1000 a year, and I'll dream of you.
What is lottery?
Another type of tax.
You saying goes you gotta be in it to win it…
The small amount I pay each week for lotto is justified as a very small price to pay to dream of a better life no matter how bad the odds
I'm pretty shocked to hear how many people on OZB buy lottery tickets. For a group of people that are generally keen to cut financial waste and find savings wherever possible, avoiding the lotto seems like a no brainer.
Hahaha I thought exactly the same thing…I just wanted to stay neg-less :)
Not necessarily true.
There are a lot of people on OZB who just want to get a good deal. Nothing to do with financial waste.
How many times has a deal popped up and get everyone buying for no reason just becasue they think it's a good price? Eneloops? Other small electronic items never used? I would classify those as financial waste.
Syndicates are the way to go (which is the extent of my lotto purchasing power). However if I were capable of spending $15+ a week on a quick pick I would put all the money aside for 51 weeks and on the 52nd I would buy my tickets and increase my dull chances ;) ……………… Actually knowing me I'd put it all on red ;)
Occasionally I punt on penny dreadful ASX stocks. Thats about as close to gambling as I get.
That's true…
First stocks I ever bought, lost the lot a week later. Adelaide Steamship Company, who knew?
I won $70,000 on powerball a few years back. Was one number away from a share of $50million
Wow! So lucky.
Or unlucky - one number away!
There is a reason they call it a "tax on stupid people"
Ouch!
Harsh but true!
Part of my work involves selling lottery tickets and I'm genuinely surprised by the various hypotheses of people who buy them.
Other information:
Most importantly:
Buying lottery tickets is a complete and utter waste of money. Spend your cash on useful things or better still, invest it into your savings or paying off debt.
(It always amuses me when my batshit boss asks 'winning' customers (petty prizes) if they would like to 'reinvest' with a new ticket)
Yeah, and I like it how the TAB refers to winnings as "dividends". Like its a real investment or something.
Nope, but I have occasionally won $2 from a $1 scratchie.
I play a small amount when the jackpot is big.
I don't buy it expecting any chance of winning, but just the right to dream for a few days of what I'll do if I won. That is worth the $9 I think.
You are paying far above the expected value of each ticket. Tattersals makes a killing, regardless of whether people win it or not.
Mathematically, it's not worth playing, unless the jackpot was in the hundreds of millions.
"Mathematically, it's not worth playing, unless the jackpot was in the hundreds of millions"
Mathematically, the prize may be bigger, but chances are just as low and therefore still not worth it.
on rare occasions the expected return may become positive. There have been a couple of instances where syndicates have spent millions buying a huge number of combinations as the expected return was over 1.
…
Even where the expected return becomes positive for a single player, the risk is that with the increased entries you are very likely to split the pot. And hence back to a losing position if you bought all the tickets
A better approach might be to buy the 'disliked' combinations which people are less likely to choose. Eg sequential, or 4s / 13s (unlucky), above 31 (no birthdays)
I lottery play every now and them, probably once every 2 - 3 years.
Last official scratchie i scartched was probably over 10-15 years ago.
I doubt I will ever win any large prize in lottery.. Just not lucky…
as for scratchies.. even the first prize is hardly enough to change someones lifestyle significanlty, as far as traditional sytled prizes was concerned. $500K for a $10 scratchie can just buy you a really cheap house in Sydney
I had a set of lottery numbers that I select weekly.
Unfortunately my dog got sick and I couldn't afford to buy the tickets for the draw, and Doh, the week I couldn't afford the tickets, my numbers came up.
I've since stopped buying the lottery.
Years ago, probably in the late 1980s I think, there was a jackpot superdraw of some sort for NSW Lotto (?).
It paid a high prize, maybe $20m? Anyway, it was the highest prize ever and it generated a lot of interest in the media.
A syndicate of businesspeople got together to buy every combination of ticket numbers, ensuring they would win.
That they were doing this became public knowledge, and on the night of the draw they had a representative from the consortium interviewed on A Current Affair or similar.
I remember them explaining the logistical hassles they had, apparently the state lotteries wouldn't give them any special privileges like just handing over a cheque for the $8m or whatever the cost of picking every number was.
The interviewee said they ended up printing boxes and boxes of tickets and it got quite hectic toward the end, as they were worried they might only get 90% through the list and the winning number might be in the other 10% of entries. But they made it just in time.
The show then cut to the draw, and the numbers came up. They crossed back to the studio and the guy was looking quite smug, until the host advised that the top prize had been won by 4 entries, and so it would be shared at $5m each. The interviewee immediately started saying this was to be expected and they would need to add up all the other 2nd, 3rd etc. winning tickets they had before they could calculate how much they eventually won, but you could tell he was agitated, and things were not going the way he hoped.
I haven't heard of anybody trying this stunt again, so I guess I can conclude how it panned out.
I tried Google, but all I could find was this:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million…
It seems like a similar story but it isn't how I remember it. Maybe the same people failed in Australia but had another go in the USA?
I've always considered the purchase of lottery tickets as a reasonably good way of assessing someones intelligence.
If you're going to gamble at least do it for entertainment - in a game where you have some possibility of having an effect on the outcome.
In essence the lotteries are a stupid tax.
I used to feel the same way. Progressively I've found a lot of people use the lottery as a source of hope and something to look forward to. This includes many highly intelligent people I know.
It's somewhat like a placebo. If it's havining the desired impact, it's not relevant to the individual whether the improvement is a result of the specific treatment or the placebo. In the lottery scenario, it doesn't matter if the individual is going to win or not, as long as they are happier for it.
That said, I don't buy into the lottery myself and no idea what the long term impacts could be of not winning.
Also there's a social/conversational aspect.
But isn't it promoted as contributing to charities? Not sure.
I won $29645.39 in 2008
Went toward my home loan
I entered the genetic lottery the day I was born.
Edit: or is that conceived?
You only won third division, I see.
I asked mum to buy me a lottery ticket. Won $450 lol
Not generally, But every now and then I'll cough up $10 for a the "Big Jackpots" and then spend the next few days dreaming about what I would spend it on :)
Then I wonder why I don't try to do something with my life to earn those millions to buy that million dollar house, and multiple 200k cars I've always wanted.
Then I say "meh, too much effort" and go back to my reasonably comfortable life anyway.
nah not into it. Work hard but always broke.
I play a 12 game of Saturday lotto with my not so lucky numbers every week - when I remember - which turns out to be once or twice a month at $8 or whatever it is per ticket.
To quote my mother you have to be in it to win it. I don't gamble with anything else and I'm not going to miss that $100 a year. I'm happy to try my luck with the other few million people in the country. While mathematically the odds aren't in our favour it seems that every weekend somehow magically a random bunch of people walk away with 100,000 or 1,000,000. If lightning never strikes in my life then fine. But I'm going to damn well have at least some kind of small shot at it.
The whole "idiot tax" thing is just smug stupidity. If people are spending responsibly and reasonably for a small shot at the big time then others have no right to put them down.
My missus won just under 9 grand on lotto once lol so I let her keep playing….
Entering the lottery is buying a possibility that will not happen so you can dream about it happening.
I know you're gonna say but Diji, I might win.
Which makes about as much sense as going for a walk in the expectation of getting struck by lightning.
I occasionally play whichever national lottery goes above 20 million. Frankly I'd get more fun and winnings by playing video poker machines though.
One time I didn't feel like doing Christmas and said if I won $20,000 I'd book the next flight to Tokyo, only won $2000 though.
I do play randomly, no set of numbers, just join a syndicate.
Those who gamble on lottery are subject to Prospect Theory. Nuff Said!
I take lotto every now and then. I choose 80% of numbers my own and last 20% do random pick. So far haven't been lucky to win big numbers but used win 10-15$ every now and then. Won around 100$ couple of times. I don't smoke or drink. So i imagine i smoked couple of packs a week to try my luck :) who knows when you are going get lucky!!
I know a handful of people (4) that won enough to pay off their mortgages and pay for several holidays but not enough to retire on. Personally I have more luck from time to time when I play black jack at the Casinos or win prize money from a raffle/bingo than with lottery tickets (usually $1K).
@ChickenTalon:
Yes, that is exactly what I'm trying to say. I feel like there are a lot of people who don't have very much money, but because they can't do much with what little they have, they decide to gamble it away in the hope of making it big. That's their thought process and that's why they love risk.
It's not really a justification, it's just an analogous situation. You play a losing game when you get into insurance because it reduces your risk. People who gamble love risk, so they're willing to play a losing game to take onboard that risk.
When I say I don't feel like you don't understand probability, I don't mean in the sense of basic (high school or basic undegrad) level probability, I mean actual applied probability. In the real world, it's all about risk, the buying and selling of risk. Usually people don't like risk, which is why risk is negative value.
I've studied probability, statistics and stochastic processes and stuff for ages, along with economics and I have friends who are option traders and all that, this is the sort of stuff we banter about over a few beers.