It's The Big One!

[jiggery_pokery]

If you can recognise which of the many people who have doubtless said "It's The Big One!" over the years I like to quote, award yourself considerable smugness.

The EuroMillions lottery draw rolled over for an eleventh consecutive week last week, so a special stipulation comes into play. It cannot roll over for a twelfth consecutive week, so all

Comments

[tleberle]

This just seems silly to me, at least from the POV of, well, everyone.

We have a game here called "Mega Millions" in the state. To win the big horkin' grand prize, you must successfully match 5-of-56 numbers, and 1-of-46. Odds are roughly 1 in 176 million. Knowing this, and being able to compute expected value, I know that rationally, I shouldn't buy a ticket unless the jackpot is higher than $176,000,000. I haven't checked the window of my local convenience store, but it hasn't been $176 million in a long time.

When you consider that the jackpot starts at $12 million, and only starts to pick up steam after several weeks, when the jackpot will increase by several millions of dollars; not like "Eggheads," where it's 1,000GBP every show.

So, I'm not playing their game. If they were to put a ceiling on the prize money that says it stops rolling over at, say, $150 million, I'd never play the game.

I've conveniently forgotten all of that spiffy math that you've done because it's 10 in the morning here and I'm running on six hours sleep. But I do enjoy a good chat about probability. So thanks for that either way.

[jiggery_pokery]

Oi, oi! You're taking exactly the first approach by (a) considering the jackpot only and (b) not considering the possibility of other people sharing the jackpot with you.

There was another lottery game in the UK, Lotto Extra, which paid out a rolling jackpot for six correct 1-49 numbers only. Jackpots there started at a million and crawled up at a terribly wimpy pace - a couple of hundred thousand here, a couple of hundred thousand there, the only people playing it presumably being the ones who were obsessive about playing their lucky numbers for fear of the instance that the time they didn't play their numbers, the numbers would come up. Predictably, once the jackpot eventually climbed to £5-6 million, it started to increase more quickly, but it never reached very much. The game was closed due to lack of interest, eventually; I wish I had spotted the last week the game was to be played, with all the rollover funds presumably to be distributed somehow or another, which would very likely have been +EV itself.