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A comment on To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune. Parent comment

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]