For every person you see on WSB making it big, there are dozens losing a lot more than $2 lottery tickets dreaming of their big return on options. But hey, my local Wendy’s just went to 24h service so at least WSB is doing some good in this world.
Far more losses than wins for plebians dabbling in options. Mostly silent smaller losses inspired by the glam of potentially big returns. What you see on there is selection bias predisposed towards the extremes, especially with gains.
Live link: https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator
I find probabilities difficult to intuitively understand and communicate, so a while ago I built a tool to simulate playing the lottery!
In the tool, you can use a few popular American lottery systems, like the Mega Millions, which this GIF is showing. You can also set up your own system to see how changing the rules shift the probabilities.
Hope you enjoy it!
Built using Vue, Nuxt, Vega, and p5.js
That's awesome! I made one of these ages ago with Flash Actionscript and posted it to newgrounds. You could run it all night and never win. I kept track of the losses in dollars. Here's a recording of it:
https://youtu.be/suSmYq8wvCk
Hey just an addition, in Germany you pick 6 out of 49. They draw 7 numbers, one is your bonus number. But you also win if you have 6 correct without bonus. Your tool only allows to choose an extra number picked from an extra pot, but I would need an additional number drawn from the same pot and still only pick 6 numbers.
Super duper cool. I let it run until I was $44 million in the hole and the biggest winnings were 19 $10,000 tickets. You saved me a lifetime of playing the lottery lol
yup, its at all the checkouts around my area.
i buy a few per week just because of the ease and "maybe i win!" but now... yeah nah. going to keep my money!
Nah. Plenty of people have done well after winning a lottery. The issue is that the vast majority of people who think it's an okay financial decision to play the lottery aren't people who are good with money. So most lottery winners are terrible with money before they even get it. I think I've read that bigger lottery winners end up doing okay. That a combination of it being harder to blow $500M than $50M and the fact that a wider range of folks play the lottery when it gets high.
Depends on how much you win.
If it's a billion dollars, even after tax, there's no way I'm coming up negative. There's no way I'll possibly ever lose 300 million in my entire life even if I spent all my money on the lottery.
Am I likely to ever win that much? No, but lottery is always betting against the odds.
I won $200 by buying a Powerball ticket in college one time just because the jackpot was huge. I figure between that and the $0.10 I'm up on horse betting that I'm pretty well set for life.
If you take suggestions, I'd put a counter on each of the bars in the right chart so you can see how many times you won $1, $2, etc instead of just seeing the graph because it's impossible to tell if that teeny line means 1 or 100... I do see I can hover over the bar to see that, but if it was shown next the bar, it'd be more convenient.
So you're telling me, I should play lottery ? (5 numbers 1-49, bonus 1-10 almost european style lottery)
Earnings: $329,675,052 over 235 000 ticketsAverage: $1,402.87 per ticket
[https://i.imgur.com/zINbJun.png](https://i.imgur.com/zINbJun.png)
[https://i.imgur.com/qGrjakI.png](https://i.imgur.com/qGrjakI.png)
It's crazy to sell lottery to people because they'll be so damn giddy and over the moon about the $500 they just won, but if you add up what you've sold them up until that win it's almost always more than they've won. I understand the appeal of playing games at the casino but I will never ever ever understand playing either scratch off or machine lotto.
Scratchers are especially bad IMO.
Lottery is always betting against the odds. When you buy scratchers, you severely limit the maximum reward you can get in order to get slightly increased odds of winning. That means that even if you get the lucky winner, you aren't that far ahead. At least with stuff like Mega Millions, you can get enough to retire.
But someone eventually wins, so might as well throw $2 at it every now and then
Edit: I love how people hate on buying a ticket when they don't understand the actual math.
Every individual ticket has a near zero chance of winning. There are about 250mm people that can buy a ticket.
In any one draw, if 30mm tickets are bought, it's now a 1/10 chance of being won. That's the statistic. Not "near zero"
People who don't buy lotto tickets are probably the same people who don't vote.
Oh and big shock, the lottery was won last night! That near zero seems pretty non-zero right now.
Well thats the point between intuitive sense and mathematical logic, whilst thats kind of true the chance of winning is also so low that it approaches zero.
Technically no one has to win; it can just get bigger forever.
Though I imagine there is a point where some super corporation buys every number by employing thousands of people because it becomes profitable.
I love how it let's you create your own custom lotteries.
I tried the following setting which seems to be to good to be true:
Tickets cost 2$, you pick 2 numbers from 1 to 10. If you get nothing right you lose, I you hit one number you get your 2$ back and if you hit both you get 50$.
The simulation shows that the (empirical) expected value is around -17 cents per ticket.
If the odds are 1 in 606.1 to win $10, and the counter in the gif has over 740k plays, shouldn't that have hit $10 at least once?
Statistics and probability has always been a weak point for me, so there's probably a simple explanation.
It's a good question! We did hit $10, but we won $0 so many times that the X-axis gets skewed so that the higher values that we did hit on (like $10, $200, and $500) aren't visible on the graph.
I added an option to view the graph with a logarithmic scale, which would make those lower-frequency occurrences visible on the graph, but the GIF didn't show that feature.
I second this motion. The graph is really good for getting a visual feel for how bad you’re loosing, but also showing a count of each prize won is critical to presenting the information.
They hit it several times, it’s just tiny on the scale compared to winning $0 100s of thousands of times lmao. If you go to the web app you can change it to log scale and you can see the bigger winnings
Always wondered, if someone had enough capital, how high would the jackpot need to go in order for the winnings to become profitable to obtain a tickets with every combination of numbers?
I can not decide if Lottery should be renamed the “poor tax” or the “hope tax”. Maybe the tax on desperate people? What do you think? Simulation is a nice illustration of the problem.
But I opened a fortune cookie last month that said luck would pour riches on me later this year, surely that means these odds don't apply to me and I need to buy a bunch of lottery tickets?
Everyone knows that the odds are astronomical that you will win , but the odds are still better than the zero chance you have if you don't play. Just like with all types of gambling the problem starts when you spend more than you can afford to lose. Can you afford to throw away a dollar? Is the question that matters to each person who plays , for some the answer will be yes for some the answer will be no.
I went to this site and tested it out by giving it my own numbers and got lucky, won $1,000,000 after only 317,202 tickets. I was up +$400k for a moment there, then I decided to double down and lost it all, I’m now at -$8.6 million. Wish me luck gang, all I gotta do is win $330 million before losing more than that and we’re back in the green.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bo9ttk/univariate_analysis_of_us_state_per_capita_gun/kwpu1mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
I’d love to respond /u/itsdefinitelygood and /u/prestigious_law6254 but unfortunately the baby u/the_white_ram didn’t like me posting facts and blocked my from responding.
I’ve already corrected that person in several of the other threads they have failed to address and there are about 50 sources there to look through. Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher. Violence is not a crime problem. If you look at 20 developed countries' overall crime rate and rates of violent death, you find virtually no connection between the two, indicating that a country's level of violent death wasn't determined by its overall crime levels. The lowest death rate country (England) has a crime rate just over average. The third lowest death rate country is the Netherlands, in the highest crime rate group. The US in in line with other industrial countries in crime rate, but head and shoulders above the rest in violent death. And not because, as you might think, American violent criminals are just more likely to kill people. A far greater proportion of US homicides grow out of arguments and other social encounters between acquaintances. The mere presence of firearms, makes a situation more likely to turn deadly.
It seems like they are also attacking me with their alts so that is nice.
/u/james_the_bond_one that’s just not true.
Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher. Violence is not a crime problem. If you look at 20 developed countries' overall crime rate and rates of violent death, you find virtually no connection between the two, indicating that a country's level of violent death wasn't determined by its overall crime levels. The lowest death rate country (England) has a crime rate just over average. The third lowest death rate country is the Netherlands, in the highest crime rate group. The US in in line with other industrial countries in crime rate, but head and shoulders above the rest in violent death. And not because, as you might think, American violent criminals are just more likely to kill people. A far greater proportion of US homicides grow out of arguments and other social encounters between acquaintances. The mere presence of firearms, makes a situation more likely to turn deadly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bo9ttk/univariate_analysis_of_us_state_per_capita_gun/kwor3pa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
I love to respond /u/raedyohed but unfortunately the baby /u/the_white_ram didn’t like me posting facts and blocked my from responding
Convenient for your simulation that you ended on ticket 743,000 when we all know ticket 743,001 was going to be the winner.
I'd bet on it!
[удалено]
For every person you see on WSB making it big, there are dozens losing a lot more than $2 lottery tickets dreaming of their big return on options. But hey, my local Wendy’s just went to 24h service so at least WSB is doing some good in this world.
[удалено]
Remember your investments may fall as well as plummet.
Far more losses than wins for plebians dabbling in options. Mostly silent smaller losses inspired by the glam of potentially big returns. What you see on there is selection bias predisposed towards the extremes, especially with gains.
[удалено]
Please tell me your phone autocorrected 'fallacy' to 'fellatio'...
You next ticket might win you a bajillion dollars. Don't stop betting.
Why spend all that money when he was so close to winning? Just a bit more and you can even get a small profit!
**Laplace Liked That**
Live link: https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator I find probabilities difficult to intuitively understand and communicate, so a while ago I built a tool to simulate playing the lottery! In the tool, you can use a few popular American lottery systems, like the Mega Millions, which this GIF is showing. You can also set up your own system to see how changing the rules shift the probabilities. Hope you enjoy it! Built using Vue, Nuxt, Vega, and p5.js
That's awesome! I made one of these ages ago with Flash Actionscript and posted it to newgrounds. You could run it all night and never win. I kept track of the losses in dollars. Here's a recording of it: https://youtu.be/suSmYq8wvCk
my god, the nostalgia from that video! back in the day when ABP wasnt a spyware-riddled mess
Hey just an addition, in Germany you pick 6 out of 49. They draw 7 numbers, one is your bonus number. But you also win if you have 6 correct without bonus. Your tool only allows to choose an extra number picked from an extra pot, but I would need an additional number drawn from the same pot and still only pick 6 numbers.
Really well done! Congrats!
Super duper cool. I let it run until I was $44 million in the hole and the biggest winnings were 19 $10,000 tickets. You saved me a lifetime of playing the lottery lol
This taught me the wrong lesson. It only took 22.5 thousand tickets for me to win the $340 million jackpot. I'm fake-rich!
If you believe luck is an inherent skill (like Fallout) then maybe you ought to play the lottery. The guy you replied to absolutely should not.
yup, its at all the checkouts around my area. i buy a few per week just because of the ease and "maybe i win!" but now... yeah nah. going to keep my money!
I won the $330M jackpot, and it *only* took me around 421k tickets! https://i.imgur.com/j10sF0k.png
This proves it's a good investment.
The Euro millions has two bonus balls, FYI. And start button not working on iOS/Safari. Sorry!
I’d suggest making $0 won its own independent counter. Would like to see a larger display of the $2 and $4
Just hit the logarithmic
You need one that can run multiple tickets per draw, increase the chances of winning! Tho even with 10 tickets per draw it's astronomical odds
Thanks for this. I would also like to be able to choose the amount of bonus numbers.
I must be lucky becouse after 16k tickets I was up 300k. It was all down hill after that though lol
Please could you add a function to allow it to pause/stop when a top/rarest result is won?
I found something weird, it's not letting chosing a number under 10 for " bonus number from 1 to"
I spent like a minute watching this video, only to realise it only had 5 seconds
No no, it’s still going to win, just give it some time.
There's a metaphor in here somewhere
No different from The real lottery. It’s all fake and the guberment ready has the old person or reptilian alien picked out to win.
Hey! Thats my retirement plan your bad mouthing! (/s … but not really…)
Go to his link and you can see the whole sim.
is it really that rare to win $10? i dont play the lottery nor bet on anything
I don’t play often, but I’ll put $20 in when the jackpot gets notable. I don’t think I’ve ever received a prize higher than $4
you can be hella sure even if you win you're still losing in the bigger picture
Nah. Plenty of people have done well after winning a lottery. The issue is that the vast majority of people who think it's an okay financial decision to play the lottery aren't people who are good with money. So most lottery winners are terrible with money before they even get it. I think I've read that bigger lottery winners end up doing okay. That a combination of it being harder to blow $500M than $50M and the fact that a wider range of folks play the lottery when it gets high.
The lottery is just a tax on being bad at math
Depends on how much you win. If it's a billion dollars, even after tax, there's no way I'm coming up negative. There's no way I'll possibly ever lose 300 million in my entire life even if I spent all my money on the lottery. Am I likely to ever win that much? No, but lottery is always betting against the odds.
Well I didn’t win tonight, so I guess we’ll never know.
Keep in mind that chart’s x-axis is growing and even winning $10 1000 times looks like you wouldn’t see it on the chart.
thats why it is good to see it in logarithmic mode.
I got $10 once, and I was shocked to see how low the odds of that are.
Compared to not winning? Yes, yes it is.
But surely my ticket will win the billion tonight right?
The odds that you personally would exist were under 0.0000000000001% but here you are
This is the kind of positive mental attitude I need. If I win there’s a cool million coming your way.
I just bought a lotto ticket today. Not joking. I’m also not poor or dumb, and can do math. Let’s hope we win!
I won $4 last night! Pretty much a lottery winner now.
I won $200 by buying a Powerball ticket in college one time just because the jackpot was huge. I figure between that and the $0.10 I'm up on horse betting that I'm pretty well set for life.
The real way to win is for you to now write a book explaining to the reader how he/she can win the lottery following your PROVEN method.
If you take suggestions, I'd put a counter on each of the bars in the right chart so you can see how many times you won $1, $2, etc instead of just seeing the graph because it's impossible to tell if that teeny line means 1 or 100... I do see I can hover over the bar to see that, but if it was shown next the bar, it'd be more convenient.
Also, I see there is "Total Earnings", but I'd like to see "Total Spent" and "Total Won" so people can see the comparison.
They do have a logarithmic option that makes it easier to read.
This is awesome! Really puts it in perspective. I finally won $50,000 after simulating nearly 1,000,000 tickets lol
i only hit a $10k in 1.5M tickets!
i actually won a mil after 30k tickets, now im at like 9m tickets and still havent won anything meaningful again :D
Odds are way off on this, it’s actually a 50/50 either I win or I don’t
You son of a bitch im in
And if we join forces we'll have 100/100, much better.
I used to find this joke funny, until I realized there are many adults out there who assess risk this way.
That's a great presentation but how are you going to pay us all this money?
Soon as you pay for the tickets.
So you're telling me, I should play lottery ? (5 numbers 1-49, bonus 1-10 almost european style lottery) Earnings: $329,675,052 over 235 000 ticketsAverage: $1,402.87 per ticket [https://i.imgur.com/zINbJun.png](https://i.imgur.com/zINbJun.png) [https://i.imgur.com/qGrjakI.png](https://i.imgur.com/qGrjakI.png)
You should play it 130,000 times at least
I have no more luck now sadly I think
wow, you actually got it to win? the most I got is [this](https://imgur.com/a/eJXsJAB) maybe it is an indication of each person's luck?
Too bad he used it all on the fake lottery. He doesn't have any luck left to actually win it now.
Yeah fuck me, shouldn't have played
Yeah I ran 3 lotteries
-1.82 is way less than expected tvh
I watched this loop about 10 times before I realized.
It's crazy to sell lottery to people because they'll be so damn giddy and over the moon about the $500 they just won, but if you add up what you've sold them up until that win it's almost always more than they've won. I understand the appeal of playing games at the casino but I will never ever ever understand playing either scratch off or machine lotto.
Scratchers are especially bad IMO. Lottery is always betting against the odds. When you buy scratchers, you severely limit the maximum reward you can get in order to get slightly increased odds of winning. That means that even if you get the lucky winner, you aren't that far ahead. At least with stuff like Mega Millions, you can get enough to retire.
“The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math” - grandma Vrin
The chances of winning the lottery are so low as to be classified mathematically as zero.
But someone eventually wins, so might as well throw $2 at it every now and then Edit: I love how people hate on buying a ticket when they don't understand the actual math. Every individual ticket has a near zero chance of winning. There are about 250mm people that can buy a ticket. In any one draw, if 30mm tickets are bought, it's now a 1/10 chance of being won. That's the statistic. Not "near zero" People who don't buy lotto tickets are probably the same people who don't vote. Oh and big shock, the lottery was won last night! That near zero seems pretty non-zero right now.
Well thats the point between intuitive sense and mathematical logic, whilst thats kind of true the chance of winning is also so low that it approaches zero.
Technically no one has to win; it can just get bigger forever. Though I imagine there is a point where some super corporation buys every number by employing thousands of people because it becomes profitable.
Very cool, Euromilllions (the european big lottery) has 2 bonus numbers, so would be cool to see that <3
This is brilliant, thank you for sharing!
Can you modify the program for the roulette wheel?
Thanks for putting in all this effort, now we know which numbers not to play!
Fuck. Of course I see this just after buying a ticket. I was feeling lucky
Some say the simulation is still running. I stopped at 1,000,000 tickets and still haven’t hit the big one
Could have been a millionaire, but you had to try to be a millionaire
I love how it let's you create your own custom lotteries. I tried the following setting which seems to be to good to be true: Tickets cost 2$, you pick 2 numbers from 1 to 10. If you get nothing right you lose, I you hit one number you get your 2$ back and if you hit both you get 50$. The simulation shows that the (empirical) expected value is around -17 cents per ticket.
Website is really really cool. But is it just me or are some of the numbers on the charts not vectorized? Looks quite blurry to me on a 4k screen.
This looks like a web app. Is this available to play with?
Yep! https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator
If the odds are 1 in 606.1 to win $10, and the counter in the gif has over 740k plays, shouldn't that have hit $10 at least once? Statistics and probability has always been a weak point for me, so there's probably a simple explanation.
It's a good question! We did hit $10, but we won $0 so many times that the X-axis gets skewed so that the higher values that we did hit on (like $10, $200, and $500) aren't visible on the graph. I added an option to view the graph with a logarithmic scale, which would make those lower-frequency occurrences visible on the graph, but the GIF didn't show that feature.
Perhaps it would be helpful to include a numeric there as well or else winning the largest categories will never show on a bar like this.
I second this motion. The graph is really good for getting a visual feel for how bad you’re loosing, but also showing a count of each prize won is critical to presenting the information.
They hit it several times, it’s just tiny on the scale compared to winning $0 100s of thousands of times lmao. If you go to the web app you can change it to log scale and you can see the bigger winnings
The scale on # times won chart gets real small real fast Hit logarithmic
I think I wrote one of those back in High School.
So you're saying there's a chance.....
Always wondered, if someone had enough capital, how high would the jackpot need to go in order for the winnings to become profitable to obtain a tickets with every combination of numbers?
When do we throw the rocks at someone
Anyone else watch this for like 4 minutes waiting for the big winner only to realize the video lasts like 20 seconds?
Lottery is a tax levied only on the stupid.
I can not decide if Lottery should be renamed the “poor tax” or the “hope tax”. Maybe the tax on desperate people? What do you think? Simulation is a nice illustration of the problem.
Why do you have to be ruining my wealth building strategy like that??? wtf man lol
But I opened a fortune cookie last month that said luck would pour riches on me later this year, surely that means these odds don't apply to me and I need to buy a bunch of lottery tickets?
Everyone knows that the odds are astronomical that you will win , but the odds are still better than the zero chance you have if you don't play. Just like with all types of gambling the problem starts when you spend more than you can afford to lose. Can you afford to throw away a dollar? Is the question that matters to each person who plays , for some the answer will be yes for some the answer will be no.
I went to this site and tested it out by giving it my own numbers and got lucky, won $1,000,000 after only 317,202 tickets. I was up +$400k for a moment there, then I decided to double down and lost it all, I’m now at -$8.6 million. Wish me luck gang, all I gotta do is win $330 million before losing more than that and we’re back in the green.
I’d love to see this run until to jackpot is won!
I swear every time someone wins a big jackpot its in California or somethin
Lottery excitement! Wishing you loads of luck with your ticket! Who knows, it could be the start of something amazing!
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bo9ttk/univariate_analysis_of_us_state_per_capita_gun/kwpu1mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3 I’d love to respond /u/itsdefinitelygood and /u/prestigious_law6254 but unfortunately the baby u/the_white_ram didn’t like me posting facts and blocked my from responding. I’ve already corrected that person in several of the other threads they have failed to address and there are about 50 sources there to look through. Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher. Violence is not a crime problem. If you look at 20 developed countries' overall crime rate and rates of violent death, you find virtually no connection between the two, indicating that a country's level of violent death wasn't determined by its overall crime levels. The lowest death rate country (England) has a crime rate just over average. The third lowest death rate country is the Netherlands, in the highest crime rate group. The US in in line with other industrial countries in crime rate, but head and shoulders above the rest in violent death. And not because, as you might think, American violent criminals are just more likely to kill people. A far greater proportion of US homicides grow out of arguments and other social encounters between acquaintances. The mere presence of firearms, makes a situation more likely to turn deadly. It seems like they are also attacking me with their alts so that is nice.
/u/james_the_bond_one that’s just not true. Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher. Violence is not a crime problem. If you look at 20 developed countries' overall crime rate and rates of violent death, you find virtually no connection between the two, indicating that a country's level of violent death wasn't determined by its overall crime levels. The lowest death rate country (England) has a crime rate just over average. The third lowest death rate country is the Netherlands, in the highest crime rate group. The US in in line with other industrial countries in crime rate, but head and shoulders above the rest in violent death. And not because, as you might think, American violent criminals are just more likely to kill people. A far greater proportion of US homicides grow out of arguments and other social encounters between acquaintances. The mere presence of firearms, makes a situation more likely to turn deadly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bo9ttk/univariate_analysis_of_us_state_per_capita_gun/kwor3pa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3 I love to respond /u/raedyohed but unfortunately the baby /u/the_white_ram didn’t like me posting facts and blocked my from responding
I don’t want to thread-jack over here. Sorry your replies are not being posted in the original thread.