To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune

Re:To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to mak... by dfxm12 on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @10:50AM (#40052710)

Games of chance have an expected value [0], in this case the expected amount you can win with your ticket. Normally, this is very low, lower than the price of the ticket, for sure. However, when the payout is high enough, the EV goes up. If the EV surpasses the price of a lottery ticket, that's the point where you think about "investing".

Of course, calculating EV is very hard, so people just draw a line in the sand - "if the payout is $50MM or over, I will buy a ticket, otherwise, I won't".

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

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Re:To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to mak... by SketchySeaBeast on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @12:24PM (#40053976)

I think the problem with that is it forces the data into a normal distribution when it's not actually the case, and instead it's a very large bump at one end with an incredibly long tail that drags the other tickets up?

It makes sense in statistics, but as a single person with a single ticket, it's much less relevant. The EV of a ticket is over 100% of the cost, but that doesn't matter for 99.9999% of the players and only matters for the very very few with the correct numbers.

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Re:To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to mak... by ryandrake on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @12:47PM (#40054266)

Another thing about EV that gamblers conveniently forget is that it only matters if you are repeating the experiment many times. So if the lottery odds are 1:100M, and you're only buying one ticket, your odds are effectively zero, and it doesn't matter if the payout is $200M, $500M, $1B or $10B.

The casino can live with a 0.01% edge because they are conducting millions of games. You're not playing that many times.

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