- Joined
- Oct 24, 2009
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People who play the lottery are mostly idiots, he's right. Instead of spending money on something you have 1 in 100 million chance of winning, you could take it down to the roulette table and have MUCH better odds. Say you took that $100 in question, put it on say, a 30:1 shot, then kept rebetting the money.
1st win: $3,000 (1 in 30 shot)
2nd win: $90,000 (1 in 900 shot)
3rd win: $2.7 million (1 in 27,000 shot)
4th win: $81 million (1 in 810,000 shot)
5th win: $218 million (1 in 24.3 mil shot)
The lottery is a tax on people who are really bad at math.
That ignores the fact that most roulette tables have a maximum bet that is FAR less than several million dollars.
And I think that far fewer lottery players are idiots than most people assume. Oh don't get me wrong, there are plenty out there, but I think there are a lot of people who play who realize their chances of winning are miniscule, and do it because it's entertaining. As long as you understand that, it's no different than paying for any other form of entertainment.
I've gotten a lot more fun spending $2 for a powerball ticket and dreaming about what I'd do with $200 million if I won it than I've gotten out of things that cost considerably more.