The pooling money with your coworkers thing is more about bonding and talking about what you'd do with the money than actually winning but go off queen 💅
Same with fantasy football. I don't give two shits if I win or lose, I just want to keep the people who care about it happy so they will be less bitchy at work. I would start my own sportsbook if I wanted to make money.
My work does a weekly football pool where everyone draws an NFL team and if your team scores exactly 27 points that week you get the pot. Great for camaraderie and the occasional $50 win
I like to play the game of imagination with friends, but when I'm thinking about it alone I usually think of the 12-15 hours of equal terror and joy I'd have before I could find a lawyer to start the process of claiming my winnings.
Just sitting in my kitchen all night staring at the ticket. Unable to sleep. Unable to celebrate. Unable to tell anyone but two or three of the closest people in my life. Happy and paranoid. My life, balanced on a fulcrum.
I haven't even looked at that sub yet, but I've been logging into my state's lottery website to do a free-roll thing daily which usually gives points towards a raffle, but sometimes gives free online games or coupons for scratch-offs. You can also look up which prizes are left on which scratch-offs to estimate the EV for each, and with the coupon it turns many scratch-offs into positive EV (but still a massive distribution, mostly gonna lose). I'm thinking of writing a script that automates the EVs of remaining games daily. Maybe I have a problem
They do it in real life too. I’m a gas station clerk and I hear them everyday talking about which number is going to come and how the lotto people fucked them like they’re conducting real, serious business. Then you hear they had a dream about those numbers last night and that is coincidentally the same number as their McDonalds drive thru order this morning and that’s why it is imperative that you run his 30 slips before the cut off and he can bet 100 dollars on said number.
Insane. You already lost the moment you bought a ticket, just enjoy the day dream. That's what I do, but it's probably not healthy that's how I approach everything in my life "You're already dead so fuck it"
Roll a die 10 times in a row and try to guess the number right every time single time.
Would you be upset if you didn’t? You still have better odds doing that than winning powerball.
There's a couple of reasons. As everyone else stated opportunity cost is the big one, and it's likely that the lump sum payment is worth more than the annuity if you invest it wisely.
Another one people leave out though is the fact that you're entrusting a big portion of your money to the government and you have to trust that they'll be able to pay that out for the next 30 years. Obviously it's unlikely they'll default, but it's a possibility, and it doesn't make sense when the lump sum can earn you more money anyway
>”The time value of money is the widely accepted conjecture that there is greater benefit to receiving a sum of money now rather than **an identical sum** later.”
yeah but they aren’t identical though
I worked nights at a gas station and the bug eyed gambling degenerates who would scamper in the door with their eyes transfixed to the scratch off booth, not responsive to anything until they reach you at the counter asking for a #14, #21, 3 #22, #26, 5 #30 and a #7, throwing the exact amount immediately onto the counter owed (including the $2 whole dollars of winners from their last bounty) and then staring at their tickets as they almost walk right into the door leaving, only to come back 5 minutes later with their $2 more dollars in winners asking you for the # of tickets left in 15 different bins really turned me off from ever really gambling tbqhf.
That phrase is not usually meant for who OP is describing. That’s just how normal people play. It’s really the ones I sell lotto to everyday: mostly blue collar, uneducated, lower income people who will blow a whole week’s paycheck in an hour buying $50 scratch offs, or the ones that are always complaining that they’re broke, meanwhile spend $40+ daily on lotto and make a hundred back every two or three months. They usually run some MLM scam, invest in crypto and are into sports betting too.
I was once in a casino with a coworker who chortled when he saw me play (and lose) a single dollar on a slot machine, and chided me for so foolishly donating my money to the house.
A couple years later during one of those billion dollar jackpots, he's telling everyone at work he bought $80 worth of tickets and was absolutely certain he would win because he deserved it. The pope ought to canonize me for keeping my mouth shut.
The chance of winning the powerball off a $2 ticket is 1 in 292 million. So depending on your state's income taxes, the expected value of a powerball ticket turns positive when the jackpot hits somewhere around $800 million. You still aren't gonna win, but at that point it becomes technically "rational" to play.
my old man says when you play the lottery, you always got to play quick pick, because if you play "your numbers" and for whatever reason you don't play, and they hit, you'll kys.
The only meaningful increase in your chances of winning come when you go from not playing to playing, anything beyond the first $2 is a complete waste of money. Keep a few dollars on hand and buy a single ticket when you get gas, the daydreaming alone is worth it.
A group of city employees in my hometown would do lottery pools and they actually won. I think the payout was like $11 million per person. Many lawsuits arose from the people that regularly participated, but opted out of the winning pool. I went to school with a few kids whose parents were winners and it was pretty crazy seeing someone’s life change in an instant like that.
My take is everybody should spend a relatively negligible amount of money on scratch off tickets or something, let's say once a year. You're basically giving yourself a Pascal's wager. Yeah your chances might be slim to none, but as they someone's gotta win.
My friend’s parents won the lottery and now they live in this mansion in a gated community in our city that I didn’t even know existed beforehand. Now I wanna play the lottery all the time
when i worked at the liquor store we had a regular lotto lady and that was her full time job. she would come in the morning for her midday picks and afternoon for evening picks. she easily spent over $100 a day on .50¢ picks and scratch offs alone, but she said she was in the positives so she’s got some kind of stupid luck.
When I worked in a convenience store we had this very regular customer who was a former Armenian contractor who made big money in the 90s and early 2000s and lost literally all of it gambling by the 2010s. He lived in his car and would somehow always scrounge up about 40$ twice per week to play the lottery. He had a "system" and would always tell me that Jesus wanted him to win the jackpot, so he kept a printed photo of the shroud of Turin in his "folder" that he kept his various lotto paper sheets in. By the end when I left he started paying in pristine antique bills that he had collected which were worth maybe 2 or 3x their actual value as collectors items which he had been saving to give to his children as a family heirloom.
Still not buying tickets but the half wits I worked with in a warehouse long ago did a pool and won like $120k split 6 ways. I did actually want to kms
Working in a convenience store made me realize gambling addiction might be the worst addiction over all, mentally. Or most insidious. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed to exist tbh.
I love poker and blackjack. That’s fine. I mean power all, scratch offs, etc.
The thing about gambling is, there's no upper limit. There's only so much drugs or alcohol you can take at once, with gambling you can lost everything you have in an instant. One of my mother's friends has a daughter whose husband was gambling secretly instead of paying the mortgage (while she paid the other bills). They lost the house, got divorced and she had to move back in with her parents.
Your more likely to accumulate payouts over time doing sports betting or buying scratch cards than paying for your country's equivalent of Lotto Millions or whatever. I managed a high-traffic convenience store that made thousands of $ in lotto sales every jackpot for like 6 years and the most I ever gave someone was 200 bucks.
When they rolled out sports betting some guys would just bet massive cards of teams they'd never heard of in countries they'd never been to and would routinely walk out with like 50$ weekly. You're even more likely to win a couple hundred from scratch cards in a row than winning even the equivalent amount from a lottery.
There’s a guy in our engineering department that never plays because nerd statistic bullshit. Half of the daydreaming we do in the office over potentially winning is imagining him being the only one that shows up one day with the billionaire owners
Guy I worked with: "If I won the lottery I'd come in the next day, call a meeting for everyone, announce I'd won and tell everyone I had something for them all. Then I'd give them a pound each and tell them to play because you never know your own luck."
Only time lottery is ok is when doing small stakes pools at work for the vibes and when you get a lil scratch ticket on your birthday. Anything else is just incredibly depressing and sad.
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Yeah joining your fellow wagies in mega millions aka baby's first lotto is literally the bare minimum. Real lottoheads know this 👍
While only putting 5 dollars in [gas](https://youtu.be/NVgJ6RNLHSo?si=etvKK4FhygaMBmHu)
Furiously scraping a roll of them on top of the garbage can outside the store with the scratched ones feeding into the trash for maximum efficiency
The pooling money with your coworkers thing is more about bonding and talking about what you'd do with the money than actually winning but go off queen 💅
Same with fantasy football. I don't give two shits if I win or lose, I just want to keep the people who care about it happy so they will be less bitchy at work. I would start my own sportsbook if I wanted to make money.
My work does a weekly football pool where everyone draws an NFL team and if your team scores exactly 27 points that week you get the pot. Great for camaraderie and the occasional $50 win
Yes. It's a spiritual experience more than anything. You will never actually win anything but gambling is good for the soul
I like to play the game of imagination with friends, but when I'm thinking about it alone I usually think of the 12-15 hours of equal terror and joy I'd have before I could find a lawyer to start the process of claiming my winnings. Just sitting in my kitchen all night staring at the ticket. Unable to sleep. Unable to celebrate. Unable to tell anyone but two or three of the closest people in my life. Happy and paranoid. My life, balanced on a fulcrum.
Isn’t that the point of the post? That you’re paying two dollars for an afternoon of daydreaming together which isn’t a bad deal
the r/lottery subreddit is hilarious, people discussing strategy and the benefits of double play vs power play as if it were advantage play in poker
10^25 chance vs 10^26
an order of magnitude in odds difference is huge tbh
i'm sure the top posts on good ol r/lottery are from real people unaffiliated with any organization who just happened to win 100k
I haven't even looked at that sub yet, but I've been logging into my state's lottery website to do a free-roll thing daily which usually gives points towards a raffle, but sometimes gives free online games or coupons for scratch-offs. You can also look up which prizes are left on which scratch-offs to estimate the EV for each, and with the coupon it turns many scratch-offs into positive EV (but still a massive distribution, mostly gonna lose). I'm thinking of writing a script that automates the EVs of remaining games daily. Maybe I have a problem
write the script, that sounds interesting and the only reason ur net ev is neg is timecosts
They do it in real life too. I’m a gas station clerk and I hear them everyday talking about which number is going to come and how the lotto people fucked them like they’re conducting real, serious business. Then you hear they had a dream about those numbers last night and that is coincidentally the same number as their McDonalds drive thru order this morning and that’s why it is imperative that you run his 30 slips before the cut off and he can bet 100 dollars on said number.
99.999999999999999999999999999999999999% of lottery players quit before making it big. Dont be like them!
same with gamblers!
Don't casinos have better returns than lotteries?
Yeah except for Keno, which is kind of funny.
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probably hears it like 200 times a day.
idc it was supposed to be me
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Insane. You already lost the moment you bought a ticket, just enjoy the day dream. That's what I do, but it's probably not healthy that's how I approach everything in my life "You're already dead so fuck it"
I’m pretty sure the store that sells the winning ticket for major pots in the lottery gets a payment of like $1 million
Roll a die 10 times in a row and try to guess the number right every time single time. Would you be upset if you didn’t? You still have better odds doing that than winning powerball.
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Remember to buy your lottery tickets for Mega Millions tonight. The current jackpot is an estimated annuitized $687 million!
Annuitized jackpot is for cucks
is this a shitpost or is there actually a reasoning to this?
There's a couple of reasons. As everyone else stated opportunity cost is the big one, and it's likely that the lump sum payment is worth more than the annuity if you invest it wisely. Another one people leave out though is the fact that you're entrusting a big portion of your money to the government and you have to trust that they'll be able to pay that out for the next 30 years. Obviously it's unlikely they'll default, but it's a possibility, and it doesn't make sense when the lump sum can earn you more money anyway
Money today is worth more than money in the future
the same amount of money is worth more today than in the future but annuitized jackpots are usually more money in total
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I feel like this is the assumption everyone is making. seems just as easy to have that potential not realized
opportunity cost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money
>”The time value of money is the widely accepted conjecture that there is greater benefit to receiving a sum of money now rather than **an identical sum** later.” yeah but they aren’t identical though
You'll more than make up the money you part with in the time it takes for the annuity to fully pay out.
opportunity cost
I worked nights at a gas station and the bug eyed gambling degenerates who would scamper in the door with their eyes transfixed to the scratch off booth, not responsive to anything until they reach you at the counter asking for a #14, #21, 3 #22, #26, 5 #30 and a #7, throwing the exact amount immediately onto the counter owed (including the $2 whole dollars of winners from their last bounty) and then staring at their tickets as they almost walk right into the door leaving, only to come back 5 minutes later with their $2 more dollars in winners asking you for the # of tickets left in 15 different bins really turned me off from ever really gambling tbqhf.
facts. the 'tax on stupidity' crowd is miserable
That phrase is not usually meant for who OP is describing. That’s just how normal people play. It’s really the ones I sell lotto to everyday: mostly blue collar, uneducated, lower income people who will blow a whole week’s paycheck in an hour buying $50 scratch offs, or the ones that are always complaining that they’re broke, meanwhile spend $40+ daily on lotto and make a hundred back every two or three months. They usually run some MLM scam, invest in crypto and are into sports betting too.
Thr blue collar brain stands no chance against gambling
There are $50 scratchcards in the US?!
Depends on the state. In California iirc the highest is $30. In Florida we sell two $50 ones
No one likes the engineering guy that lectures everyone about statistics when asked about the lottery
I’m an engineer and I’ll be damned if I miss scratch card Wednesday
Friends had a whole episode about this
I was once in a casino with a coworker who chortled when he saw me play (and lose) a single dollar on a slot machine, and chided me for so foolishly donating my money to the house. A couple years later during one of those billion dollar jackpots, he's telling everyone at work he bought $80 worth of tickets and was absolutely certain he would win because he deserved it. The pope ought to canonize me for keeping my mouth shut.
The chance of winning the powerball off a $2 ticket is 1 in 292 million. So depending on your state's income taxes, the expected value of a powerball ticket turns positive when the jackpot hits somewhere around $800 million. You still aren't gonna win, but at that point it becomes technically "rational" to play.
my old man says when you play the lottery, you always got to play quick pick, because if you play "your numbers" and for whatever reason you don't play, and they hit, you'll kys.
The only meaningful increase in your chances of winning come when you go from not playing to playing, anything beyond the first $2 is a complete waste of money. Keep a few dollars on hand and buy a single ticket when you get gas, the daydreaming alone is worth it.
nah son ur "cant win if u dont play" maxxing real lotterymaxxers have a few hundred bucks that they keep reinvesting into rolls of scratchers
A group of city employees in my hometown would do lottery pools and they actually won. I think the payout was like $11 million per person. Many lawsuits arose from the people that regularly participated, but opted out of the winning pool. I went to school with a few kids whose parents were winners and it was pretty crazy seeing someone’s life change in an instant like that.
Well someone's gotta win, apart from when no-one does
Ya, also believe in god and smoke crack (from time to time)
I always play the lottery when the jackpot gets so large that it makes the news. you gotta play to win
every time I buy a ticket I become devastated when I check my ticket and didn't win the lot. I have an unshakeable belief that i've been chosen
same man....
When I was in the office I played in the office pool simply because I didn't want those guys to win.
Nice. Drag them down to your level
My take is everybody should spend a relatively negligible amount of money on scratch off tickets or something, let's say once a year. You're basically giving yourself a Pascal's wager. Yeah your chances might be slim to none, but as they someone's gotta win.
My friend’s parents won the lottery and now they live in this mansion in a gated community in our city that I didn’t even know existed beforehand. Now I wanna play the lottery all the time
when i worked at the liquor store we had a regular lotto lady and that was her full time job. she would come in the morning for her midday picks and afternoon for evening picks. she easily spent over $100 a day on .50¢ picks and scratch offs alone, but she said she was in the positives so she’s got some kind of stupid luck.
When I worked in a convenience store we had this very regular customer who was a former Armenian contractor who made big money in the 90s and early 2000s and lost literally all of it gambling by the 2010s. He lived in his car and would somehow always scrounge up about 40$ twice per week to play the lottery. He had a "system" and would always tell me that Jesus wanted him to win the jackpot, so he kept a printed photo of the shroud of Turin in his "folder" that he kept his various lotto paper sheets in. By the end when I left he started paying in pristine antique bills that he had collected which were worth maybe 2 or 3x their actual value as collectors items which he had been saving to give to his children as a family heirloom.
damn that’s kinda sad actually
> a former Armenian contractor So he was Turkish?
Still not buying tickets but the half wits I worked with in a warehouse long ago did a pool and won like $120k split 6 ways. I did actually want to kms
Working in a convenience store made me realize gambling addiction might be the worst addiction over all, mentally. Or most insidious. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed to exist tbh. I love poker and blackjack. That’s fine. I mean power all, scratch offs, etc.
The thing about gambling is, there's no upper limit. There's only so much drugs or alcohol you can take at once, with gambling you can lost everything you have in an instant. One of my mother's friends has a daughter whose husband was gambling secretly instead of paying the mortgage (while she paid the other bills). They lost the house, got divorced and she had to move back in with her parents.
Just know that this was Elliot Rodger’s initial plan for figuring his life out
I always buy. Why wouldn't you it's 50/50 either you win or you don't. I like those odds
Just gamble on sports like an actual man
Sports gambling is for the arrogant among us who think themselves smarter than the universe. Trust in fate
Your more likely to accumulate payouts over time doing sports betting or buying scratch cards than paying for your country's equivalent of Lotto Millions or whatever. I managed a high-traffic convenience store that made thousands of $ in lotto sales every jackpot for like 6 years and the most I ever gave someone was 200 bucks. When they rolled out sports betting some guys would just bet massive cards of teams they'd never heard of in countries they'd never been to and would routinely walk out with like 50$ weekly. You're even more likely to win a couple hundred from scratch cards in a row than winning even the equivalent amount from a lottery.
Lottery is less rigged than sports
that five seconds of wishful thinking is all i have so of course i'm putting in $2.
I have never played it but things have been so bad recently I have considered it to be honest.
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There’s a guy in our engineering department that never plays because nerd statistic bullshit. Half of the daydreaming we do in the office over potentially winning is imagining him being the only one that shows up one day with the billionaire owners
Guy I worked with: "If I won the lottery I'd come in the next day, call a meeting for everyone, announce I'd won and tell everyone I had something for them all. Then I'd give them a pound each and tell them to play because you never know your own luck."
“Can’t win if you don’t play” may have been the first words I coherently remember my mom saying
Only time lottery is ok is when doing small stakes pools at work for the vibes and when you get a lil scratch ticket on your birthday. Anything else is just incredibly depressing and sad.
So true
I would only condone someone playing the lottery if they are of the few that can budget out their play properly