Better Than Expected

[kevin_standlee]

To be honest, I expected to win nothing at all on the twenty PowerBall tickets I bought. So it was a relatively pleasant surprise to get the PB itself (10), and in both cases I also got one number on the main board, so that's a $10 winner overall.

I see that there were three winners, so when you work out the odds and the pot being split three ways, it turns out to be roughly an even or "fair" bet, in that the payouts to the three winners will be approximately the 290M:1 odds against winning. To that extent, it's a better bet than most.

Comments

[mneme]

I'll note that since the pay-in is $2, not $1, that it's still the opposite of a fair bet. But the odds of a collision if you picked a good number is low enough that it was reasonably -close- to fair this time; that a collision happened is just how things broke.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

A good point. The odds against winning are about 290M:1, so the (cash value) payout needed to be $580M to be a "fair" bet, given a $2 bet.