Simply Statistics: Playing Powerball And Your Chances Of Actually Winning
OK, so we've all probably seen those stats on things that are more likely to happen to you than winning the lottery – like shark attacks, being hit by lightning, and dying on the way to buy a lotto ticket (maybe after being hit by lightning).
But someone is going to win, right? That idea alone has to be one of the biggest reason millions of people keep playing the lottery every week.
Thanks to the power of the internet (and simple computing), it's actually quite easy to simulate playing the lottery – and how futile it can be.
With the Powerball jackpot reaching $500 million today, we ran 11 simulations using this online simulator we found. The simulator, which goes by if you were buying one $2 ticket every Wednesday and Saturday, generates 6 random numbers (including the "Power" number) and then plays the game for as many years as it takes for you to win the jackpot with those numbers.
It doesn't make a difference if you only play with one set of numbers, because choosing new numbers each week does not increase your chances of winning. Understand that with each new drawing, every number is again available to be drawn.
With these parameters, anyone who plays Powerball has about a 1 in 175,000,000 chance of winning the jackpot. Consider this: things like filling out a perfect NCAA March Madness bracket and shuffling a deck of cards into perfect order are the few things less likely to happen than winning the lottery.
So how did we do? In all of our simulations, the shortest time it took us to win the Powerball jackpot, playing every Wednesday and Saturday, is 36,520 years. Mind you, we spent $7,201,678 in tickets towards this endeavor – which, if you're an optimist, means you will still be in the black since each Powerball jackpot is worth at least $40 million.
Horrifically, the longest it took us to win in one simulation was 3,809,249 years. This means we spent $794,607,852 in tickets – which is more than the largest Powerball jackpot in history ($590.5 million in 2013).
It should be noted, if it's not already obvious, that your chances of winning do not increase the more you play. You always have a 1 in 175,000,000 chance of winning with each drawing, if you only buy a $2 ticket.
With such a small sample size, little generalizable data can be gleamed from our simulations. However, since Powerball's rules do not change over time and the way numbers are chosen is perfectly random, patterns will eventually begin to show up. Our simulations show that, on average, it will take around 1.9 million years in order to win a jackpot – meaning an average of about $413.8 million spent on tickets. Those averages will fluctuate if we played more, but probably not by much.
Feeling hopeless yet? Someone has to win it, right? Well, just remember that the whole reason the jackpot has reached $500 million is because no one has won for the past two months.
If you're still planning on playing, you have until 7 p.m. PST today to buy a ticket. The drawing will be at 7:59 p.m.