It is really hard to win the Mega Millions lottery. So hard that it can be difficult to comprehend what long odds confront its players.
Why not try for free on this Mega Millions lottery simulator? You’ll be able to try the same numbers over and over, simulating playing twice a week for a year or 10. You’ll never win.
Mega Millions Lottery Simulator
Select your lucky numbers and click the 10 years option and see how much you’d win in this Mega Millions lottery simulator
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. This just proves it.
Mathman54’s rules for playing the lottery:
1) A man should never gamble more than he can stand to lose. Universal #1 rule of gambling and politics.
2) Statistics cannot tell me what number will win, but it tells me there will be a winner AND the winner will have a lotto ticket. Put another way, the probability of winning without a ticket is 0, the probability of winning with a ticket is nearly 0, but almost infinitely better than no ticket. Buying more than one ticket is a waste of money until you have bought more than half of the available number combinations.
3) Spending a dollar on a lottery ticket is less of a gamble than spending $10 on a movie ticket. For one dollar I have a chance of winning and I will have days of entertainment thinking about what I will do with the money. With a movie ticket I will almost certainly have lost $10 and at least 1.5 hours of my life wondering why I let myself be talked into seeing this crap.
Yeah, you could save all that money and put it into the stock market and …..hmmmmm, nevermind.
Okay, you could take all that money and buy alcohol.
I like the lottery, and other type of “opt-in” taxes, like vanity car plates. At least this way people want to pay taxes and those who do get to feel like they are getting something back or a chance to get something. If they didn’t get tax money this way, they’d get it another.
“In the 23692040 times this simulation has run, players have won $50208229
And by won I mean they have won back $50,208,229 of the $23,692,040 they spent (211%).”
Is it me, or is this person doing a bad job of convincing me that the lottery is bad.