13 December 2007 - 7:45Can the lottery be beat when the jackpot gets high enough
If “beating” the lotto means having a payback/risk ratio of greater than 1, I would say that state lottos are definitely beatable.
In Texas Pick-6 lotto, you pick 6 mutually exclusive numbers from 1 to 50. That gives you approximately 1/16,000,000 chance of winning.<
Many people do not play until the lotto jackpot goes over $16,000,000, as a result. It’s a little more complicated than that though, because the money is paid out over 20 years, and you have to account for inflation. The actual value of the money you get paid is (assuming constant %5 inflation) is the jackpot divided by 20 times the sum from 0 to 19 of (.95)**N, where N is the summation index. The sum is 12.83, in this example, so you really need to wait until the lotto is (20/12.83)*16,000,000, or approximately $25 million. Texas Pick-6 frequently exceeds this total, but resets to $3 million when somebody wins.
Of course, all this is predicated on being the sole winner of a $25 million lotto, or at least, say, winning $75 million and splitting with at most two other people. You can reduce the number of people that you split with by picking the numbers that nobody else does. I use this formula in picking numbers:
People tend to play birthdays. Don’t pick any number less than 32.
People sometimes will play geometric sequences on the card, such as rows, and columns, and diagonals. Don’t pick these either.
Even educated people will refuse to play a numeric sequence, such as 32-33-34-35-36-37, because they think that it isn’t “random enough”. Sequences are good to pick, as long as they do not occupy a single row or column.
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