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Why not just buy all the lottery tickets?

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Kaladin

Member
The odds for wining the lottery are 1 in 292 million. That means that there are 292 million possible # combinations in the lottery. So you would have to purchase 292 million tickets to get all of the possible lottery tickets in any given drawing.
 
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blamite

Member
brkoYqV.png
 
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Sho_Nuff82

Member
Angry Grimace said:
1) Because if even 1 other person won you'd lose a catastrophic amount of money.
2) It is physically impossible to buy 292 million lottery tickets in every single combination.
3) You don't get to be the kind of person who can spend $600,000,000 on things by gambling $600,000,000
Click to expand...

1) build army of ticket buying robots to buy tickets everywhere simultaneously
2) bribe every average Joe in the country with $100 for mailing their ticket to you, with the caveat that they only get paid if you win unanimously (most people will take the guaranteed $98 profit option)
3)???
4) profit
 
L

LyleLanley

Banned
Lovely Salsa said:
my method gives you 1584 lines per ticket

Am I doing something wrong here?
Click to expand...

Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding something here you would still end up paying for 292 million lines.

BearPawB said:
statistically multiple people will win
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Out of curiosity where's the logic behind this? I'm not saying your wrong but it just seems strange that we'd get to that from a drawing on saturday in which there was, I believe, a ~70% chance of a win for one single person.
 
L

LyleLanley

Banned
Patroklos said:
I would think a massive GAF pool would have a very good chance in winning.
Click to expand...

Good luck getting an honest enough person to not steal either the pooled money or the winnings.

Lovely Salsa said:
yes, you want to pay for all possible combinations, no? So instead of 292 million tickets, you can do it with 184k tickets
Click to expand...

I assume these guys are just going to go to a store and buy these tickets manually so you'd end up with the exact same amount of actual physical tickets if you purchased them yourself.
 
S

Steve Youngblood

Member
Lovely Salsa said:
my method gives you 1584 lines per ticket

Am I doing something wrong here?
Click to expand...

I don't follow what you're talking about at all here. I don't know how this website works, but if you were to go to a physical location and buy a ticket, one set of numbers (or a line) costs $2. I think you can do five lines on one actual ticket, but you're paying $2 per line, or $10 total for that ticket.

Like if I go to the track and say I want to bet on a 1 - 2 - 3 trifecta for $2, I can either only pay $2 for the straight trifecta in which the horses have to finish in that order, or I can box it for $12 which basically means I'm buying all six options for $2 a piece without having to buy six tickets. Not exactly the same thing, I know. I'm just saying you don't get a discount on these bets by buying one ticket.
 
G

gutshot

Member
Only way I could see this being possible is if Powerball launched an online purchase option thereby making it feasible to write a script that systematically went through and purchased all 292 million number combinations. Having to rely on yourself or others to fill out by hand 292 million number combinations accurately is a fool's errand.

And even then, you run the risk of ending up having to split the jackpot, putting you in the red.
 
E

Einhander

Member
LyleLanley said:
Good luck getting an honest enough person to not steal either the pooled money or the winnings.
Click to expand...

A trusted GAF mod could be the organizer. One voted by everyone involved in the pool. Stump would be a good candidate. Or it doesn't have to be a mod. A GAF member voted by everyone in the pool.
 
L

LyleLanley

Banned
gutshot said:
Only way I could see this being possible is if Powerball launched an online purchase option thereby making it feasible to write a script that systematically went through and purchased all 292 million number combinations. Having to rely on yourself or others to fill out by hand 292 million number combinations accurately is a fool's errand.

And even then, you run the risk of ending up having to split the jackpot, putting you in the red.
Click to expand...

https://www.myillinoislottery.com/en-us/extendedplay/powerball.html

Get to work.
 
R

Randolph Freelander

Member
Lovely Salsa said:
yes, you want to pay for all possible combinations, no? So instead of 292 million tickets, you can do it with 184k tickets
Click to expand...

I hate to burst your bubble, but that math doesn't work for the lottery.

I hate to double burst your bubble, as you apparently didn't notice that the site is charging you for all those combinations. (Actually, over-charging you.) You're paying 3.50 (euro) per combination. When you select 12 + 2, the total is 5544 euros. You're buying 1584 separate tickets, each 5 + 1.

kMZ5ZNj.png
Click to expand...
 
F

FunkyDealer

Banned
Imagine if the price was split so that every winner got between 50k and 1m.

That would do a hell of a lot more good than having a very low number of super rich winners.
 
G

gutshot

Member
Patroklos said:
I would think a massive GAF pool would have a very good chance in winning.
Click to expand...

Even if you got every one of GAF's 164,480 members to purchase 5 entries AND you could somehow guarantee all of those were unique number combinations, you would still have only 824,200 entries or about a 0.3% of winning.
 
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bootsthecat

Banned
Wouldn't the fastest way be to specially format a printer to fill out those slips that people usually fill in manually? Ours in NH is 5 tickets worth, maybe other states have bigger ones...Then it would only be 58.4 million slips to print, and for the convenience stores/lottery commission to process. Seems doable lol.
June1854042-NH-PowerBall__Frt-(1)
 
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Lovely Salsa

Banned
Steve Youngblood said:
I don't follow what you're talking about at all here. I don't know how this website works, but if you were to go to a physical location and buy a ticket, one set of numbers (or a line) costs $2. I think you can do five lines on one actual ticket, but you're paying $2 per line, or $10 total for that ticket.

Like if I go to the track and say I want to bet on a 1 - 2 - 3 trifecta for $2, I can either only pay $2 for the straight trifecta in which the horses have to finish in that order, or I can box it for $12 which basically means I'm buying all six options for $2 a piece without having to buy six tickets. Not exactly the same thing, I know. I'm just saying you don't get a discount on these bets by buying one ticket.
Click to expand...

You can't go to a store, fill in a system game, choose 12 numbers + 2 bonus numbers and pay for the system around 3300 dollars? for those numbers

Its not about saving dollars, its about saving time.

example

In the domestic lottery, you get to pick 7 numbers. Now each time you pick 7 numbers it costs you 30 cents. However, you can choose to pick more numbers if you wish.

If I were to pick 9 numbers, it would cost me 12 bucks instead, 10 numbers 36 bucks etc

I hope you get where I'm getting at
 
B

Brakke

Banned
backflip10019 said:
Then there's the issue of finding the winning ticket (since you'll have millions on hand), which could take you months to do yourself.
Click to expand...

This wouldn't be too difficult. Presumably you buy the tickets in order in the first place. If you put them all in one huge ordered pile it'd take like 30 operations to find the one. Probably less since its be physically impossible to pile them all up together, so you're going to have them grouped in buckets anyway.
 
J

Joe Shlabotnik

Banned
Lovely Salsa said:
You can't go to a store, fill in a system game, choose 12 numbers + 2 bonus numbers and pay for the system around 3300 dollars? for those numbers

Its not about saving dollars, its about saving time.

example

In the domestic lottery, you get to pick 7 numbers. Now each time you pick 7 numbers it costs you 30 cents. However, you can choose to pick more numbers if you wish.

If I were to pick 9 numbers, it would cost me 12 bucks instead, 10 numbers 36 bucks etc

I hope you get where I'm getting at
Click to expand...

No idea what you're talking about and the U.S. Powerball doesn't work like that at all.

Each chance (line) is $2 and you pick 5 numbers and the Powerball number. To win the jackpot your line has to match the 5 winning numbers and the Powerball number exactly. A ticket can fit up to five separate lines but that doesn't mean anything for the contest. There are no extra numbers to pick.
 
L

Lovely Salsa

Banned
Joe Shlabotnik said:
No idea what you're talking about and the U.S. Powerball doesn't work like that at all.

Each chance (line) is $2 and you pick 5 numbers and the Powerball number. To win the jackpot it has to match the 5 winning numbers and the Powerball number exactly. A ticket can fit up to five lines but that doesn't mean anything for the contest. There are no extra numbers to pick.
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then multilotto.com is BSing, they truly would go out and buy 1000+ different lottery numbers for that 1 form you just filled (and overpayed)
 
E

Eusis

Member
Angry Grimace said:
3) You don't get to be the kind of person who can spend $600,000,000 on things by gambling $600,000,000
Click to expand...
At best you're a multi billionaire who wants to see if they can for amusement. And really, there's better crazy things to do with hundreds of millions for the sake of personal amusement that might either help humanity or at least you can try to profit off of by broadcasting or whatever.
 
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