Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
I don't really understand that mentality of jumping into lotteries with a massive jackpot. So people are thinking pfft, $100 mil is no biggie - but I gotta get on that train if it's $1 billion! Don't you have much lower odds of winning when so many people buy tickets?
I'd rather have X odd of winning $1 million than X/10 odd of winning $10 million or X/1000 odds of winning $100 million.
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The odds of winning either one are so astronomical that any difference, no matter how great, seems negligible.
If you were buying the $1mil tickets for probability reasons, you'd be buying them every week. The large prize amount gives someone like me the incentive to spend a little money on some tickets because I don't expect to win anything at all regardless of the prize, might as well take a shot at the big one.
*** As an aside, I don't think the total necessarily means more tickets are being purchased. Honestly don;t really have a clue about how the powerball works probability wise, but conventional lotteries carry prize amounts from weeks with no winners into the next week. That's why the totals increase until someone wins. That doesn't necessarily mean that more people buy when a Lotto Max is at $50 mil than when it's at $15. Although there probably is just because people like me enter the game because the total is the incentive.