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Give me one very good month of buying lottery tickets and I can get there. I swear I can get there..
Clearly the problem is that you're not buying enough lottery tickets
I do wonder about that. Odds of winning the Powerball are 1 in 292.2 million. So theoretically if you spent $292 million on a $1B powerball payout (and no one else won), you be guaranteed to win and should come out well ahead because you’d have other tickets that would win downstream amounts. It’s just having that initial capital and surprised we haven’t seen someone try to invest that amount.
Most lotteries are setup to prevent this. There's a fun movie "Jerry and Marge Go Large" based on a true occurrence of this happening.
But I think it’s a bit incidental, no? That is, you have a logistical problem of not having enough hours in the day to stand at a machine and enter numbers by hand (even if you hire others). Guess that would vary state to state, country to country, in how they sell them.
Of course the catch is that even if you pull it off, you have no certainty on how many people you will split it with.
I only play when the odds are favorable. That is, when the statistical expectation is at least nearly the cost of the ticket. But I’m a bit put off by the fact that I cannot order a machine-generated number that has not yet been sold.
I don't know about that lottery specifically, but surely the tickets cost more than $1 then? The payout is usually less than the cost of buying every ticket. There's an interesting chapter in Alex's adventures in numberland about this, about how a mathematician actually did this, but was only able to do it because the prize had rolled over from multiple draws, ordinarily it would not be viable.
The issue is that multiple winners split the jackpots, which is why playing common numbers like dates (birthdays) is a terrible strategy since so many people play those.
When the Powerball exceeds the value of being able to purchase all of the numbers it is common that the number of tickets sold more than doubles the Total number of numbers which statistically guarantees multiple winners. Almost nobody wins those billion dollar jackpots by themselves.