OK, I expect this may have been asked already but I'll ask anyway. I made it a poll mainly because I've never made one before.

I'm in no way a numbers person but I also think the odds of winning the lottery aren't worth my precious pound coin. I was wondering if people with a better understanding of numbers or probability than me do the lottery more, less or whether it affects your decision to enter at all.

How else am I going to be able to moving into that cliff-hugging Malibu home?

Ironclad wrote:How else am I going to be able to moving into that cliff-hugging Malibu home?

You need to talk to Sityl and find out how much he knows of this magic, multiplying penny. If you don't, I will.

I like your optimism. About Malibu.

Hmmmm

I would describe myself as mathematically literate and I enter the lottery most weeks for £1.

It comes out of my general weekly 'slush fund' that I spend on anything that takes my fancy, a magazine I'm not subscribed to, that sort of thing. Deciding how I'd give away / spend the jackpot idly occupies enough time and is fun enough to be worth the £1.

Just because it's not an efficient investment from a purely financial point of view doesn't necessarily mean that everyone who enters needs to be described as being afraid of 'Big Words'!

Clearly this is different to morons spending money they can't afford in the vain hope of striking it rich as a solution to their problems.

I was tempted the other week when the Euro Millions Jackpot got to around £150m. But no, I've never bought a lottery ticket.

Every week I do the "Norsk Tipping" lotto on Saturday and the "Viking Lotto" on Wednesday. Don't miss many weeks in a year. Spend 100kr on each of those days (around £20 total which is not that much in this economy). This consists of 2 x 10 line tickets and one "joker". Any winnings just accumulate in your account and, unless you withdraw it , they pay this automatically into your bank account just before Xmas. If I saved this money (lets say 48 weeks) I would have 9600 kr at the end of each year. In 10 years the highest ever payback I've had is around 6000 total for the year with the average being about 2500 kr. Ah well, one day.........

mraltair wrote:

Ironclad wrote:How else am I going to be able to moving into that cliff-hugging Malibu home?

You need to talk to Sityl and find out how much he knows of this magic, multiplying penny. If you don't, I will.

Yeah, give me a dollar, and I'll give you a one in 250,000,000 chance of learning how to double the value of a penny, exponentially for 31 days!

I buy a ticket once or twice a year, a dollar at a chance for $200m+ is worth the chance, to me anyway. I am not one to gamble, have been a casino twice in my life, won both times. Once on poker, once on nickel slots. Both more than $100. Now I'm slowly wasting away all those winnings trying to turn them into a nice 200 million . At the rate I'm going I'll break even sometime in the next 50 years.

I've a friend who's covinced he's discovered a "secret" (which he won't share with me) about the lottery. He believes he can know the numbers by studying past numbers leading up to each draw. He pours over the numbers every time before doing the Lotto and making additional bets on the numbers at the bookies. He spends over €40 a week and does manage a few small wins but his confirmation bias is severe. He takes each win and near win as evidence that he really can know the numbers.
I got him to admit that if you put 48 ping pong balls into a drum they would come out randomly so what, I asked him, makes them special if they're coloured and numbered? "You don't understand..." he tells me. Maybe not but I do have small understanding of physics and cognitive dissonance.

My friend got his cat to pick some numbers for him as a test (i'm not quite sure how he managed this but the cat pawed them somehow). Imagine how pissed off he was when that night, he got 5 numbers and the bonus ball but didn't buy a ticket (and the whole point of the exercise was to show how dumb it was to buy a ticket ).

My father told me how he explains it to people to help visaulise it. The odds are what, 14 million to 1. So you simply imagine a bag of a thousand white balls in it. Inside that you place a black ball. Now close your eyes and dip in your hand and remove the black ball.

Now take out the black ball and fill 14 bags with a 1000 white balls in them and place the black ball randomly in one and now pick one, close you eyes and see what you pull out.

Now draw a square or circle around that group of 14 bags with a 1000 balls each inside. Draw another 1000 circles and fill them with the same number of bags and balls and in one, randomly place a black ball. Off you go!

If I said there's 5 million pounds and it's yours if you pull out the black ball but you can only try once a week and each time you try, we move the black ball to another bag.

Maybe so, but you can daydream entirely for free.