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| 22 Dec 2014 02:50 PM |
In a lottery, the more tickets you buy, the less each ticket actually counts towards your winnings.
Imagine a local lottery where 100 people have bought tickets so far. If you buy a ticket, you don't have a 1/100 chance of winning, you have a 1/101 chance because you added to the number of total people.
Let's say, you buy 2 tickets. That's not 2/101 chances of winning. That's 2/102 chances, so each ticket has overall less value. They each count for only 1/102 rather than 1/101.
Let's say I buy 50 tickets. You'd think since there's 100 people, I'd have a 50% chance. Now that means each ticket has 1/150 chances of winning, and my total tickets is 50, so I actually only have a 33.3% chance.
So, yeah. The more tickets you buy, the less value each individual ticket has of winning. Buying tickets in bulk does increase your chances, but not as much as you would think. Even buying as much tickets as everyone else combined only gives you a 50% chance of winning: a flip of a coin. You could just as likely have wasted all that money as winning.
Essentially: buying tickets in the first place is dumb. Don't do lotteries. |
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