[HN Gopher] Lottery Simulator (2023)
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Lottery Simulator (2023)
Author : airstrike
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-09-10 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (perthirtysix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (perthirtysix.com)
| airstrike wrote:
| Now I just need to scrape the data on all major lotteries
| worldwide, plop them all into the simulator, make some
| assumptions about exchange rates and figure out where in the
| world I should bet on the lottery to get the best payout!
| itake wrote:
| the expected value of each ticket is negative, but going from 0
| tickets to 1 ticket, increases your chances of a big win by
| infinity.
|
| Going from 1 to n tickets, isn't necessarily wise
| caseyy wrote:
| Estimated monetary value might be a wiser metric to use :)
|
| Going by the calculator, EMV of going from buying 0 tickets to
| 1 is -$1.85 for Mega Millions, same as going from n to n+1; n
| >= 0. The first ticket is the first one you lose with,
| statistically.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I think the saying goes buying a lottery ticket only marginally
| increases your chance of winning.
| BigParm wrote:
| Your chances were 0, you buy a ticket, and now your chances are
| x. Where x is not infinitely greater than 0, it's x greater
| than 0. Pretty sure your proposition implies that 2 tickets
| provide the same odds as one ticket (2 infinity vs 1 infinity).
|
| I haven't gotten into the discrete math in many years. If
| you're right do you mind explaining please? I can intuit what
| you're getting at. 0 odds * inf < (odds with one ticket). Is
| that a decent description?
| ff317 wrote:
| That's kind of how I look at it, in practice. I get the
| mathematical reality that buying lotto tickets is a financial
| waste. However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a
| definite 0% chance I'll ever win the big prize. Whereas if I
| play at all, at least there's a chance, however remote, of a
| quite life-changing positive event happening. So, therefore, it
| makes sense to put a very small amount of totally throw-away
| income into big-prize lotto tickets, just so you're in the game
| at all.
|
| Based on this kind of thinking, my personal rules are: never
| spend more than 0.1% of take-home pay per time-period buying
| tickets, and only buy big-prize lotto tickets that have
| potentially-life-changing payouts.
| seagullriffic wrote:
| This is almost exactly how I think about it too - a good
| repeatable mental model is "infinite upside / near-zero
| downside".
|
| These massively asymmetric choices occur elsewhere in life,
| e.g. "asking them out on a date"; "asking for a raise", and
| are good to look out for.
| ldbooth wrote:
| Very cool visualization. This will save me a few bucks next time
| I think about playing.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think this lottery simulator is a scam. I played a hundred
| thousand games and never made my money back.
| madamelic wrote:
| You obviously haven't played enough. You stopped right before
| you hit it big!
| zzanz wrote:
| I used to work at a lotto counter in my towns supermarket. When I
| started I noticed alot of older regular buyers, a weekly lotto
| purchase like the daily newspaper. However, as the younger
| generation started bringing in kids I didn't see this habit,
| instead just an occasional purchase for a birthday gift or
| rolling the dice because the jackpots gotten big enough (funnily
| enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest).
|
| Overall I would consider lotto small next to the scratch cards
| (our countries version at least). I have never seen a more
| predatory marketing strategy, and completely swept under the rug
| next to lotto being berated with anti-gambling campaigning. To be
| fair, lotto is bad, but scratch cards are much, much worse.
|
| A memory that stuck for me was a customer blowing well over $100
| bucks on scratchcards over 20 minutes, just pulling over and
| over, then getting card declined at the grocery checkouts.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| > funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is
| actually lowest
|
| Not really?
|
| The odds of winning are the same regardless, because you need
| to match every number to get a jackpot. Really, there is just
| an increased chance of splitting a jackpot with another person
| when the prize gets really large, since more tickets are
| generally sold. But I imagine EV of a lottery ticket with a $1B
| jackpot is still higher than the same lottery ticket when the
| jackpot is $100M.
| function_seven wrote:
| There's a balance between jackpot size and a given drawing's
| popularity for sure.
|
| There are also bad number choices and good number choices.
| 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a _terrible_ selection, for example. Not
| because it is somehow "less random", but because you're
| guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other
| nerds who were trying to prove a point!
|
| To a lesser degree, choosing numbers under 31, or under 12,
| will put you in a collision space with other players who like
| to choose birthdays.
|
| Just use the random pick and don't think about it. If you do
| win the jackpot, you have higher odds of being the only one.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Maybe, "the time when expected value is the lowest"?
|
| The BC 6/49 lottery (6 balls 1-49, one bonus ball) for
| example has 53% of the common "prize pool" split amongst all
| 4-ball matchers, so if you're not hitting the jackpot you get
| less cash out of a high-demand drawing.
|
| And given the prize pool is something like 18% of net
| receipts... yeah EV is still well in the negatives.
| eig wrote:
| Cool visualization!
|
| It would've been nice to not assume only one lottery winner.
| People tend to pick numbers that are meaningful for them:
| birthdays, favorite numbers, lucky numbers. Thus it actually
| significantly increases your EV if you pick unusual numbers,
| which is not reflected here.
| hammock wrote:
| So, for Mega Millions:
|
| For 1-70: Consider numbers above 31 (days of month)
|
| For 1-25: Similarly, numbers above 12 might be less common
| (months of year)
|
| What other numbers above 31 would you want to avoid? 33, 44,
| 50, 69, 70? And you might want to avoid sequences as well.
| shriracha wrote:
| Hi! I made this tool. I saw it had way more traffic than usual
| and then realized it was from HN, very cool!
|
| Would love to hear any feedback. I've been super interested in
| how well-designed web apps and visualizations can communicate
| things like probability, which I think is very hard to intuit for
| many of us.
|
| The most surprising thing I learned from the tool was just how
| bad your payouts usually were even if you cut the pool of numbers
| to pick from in half (by using the "Custom" option).
| fragmede wrote:
| On the subject of winning the lottery, the story that goes untold
| is of the MIT crew that gamed Massachusetts' Cash Windfall circa
| 2007.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...
|
| There's a movie out starring Walter White, of the Selbees side,
| called Jerry and Marge Go Large, but which talks about the story,
| but portrays the MIT kids poorly for dramatic effect.
| islewis wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how the EV can be so incredibly low? I
| know the answer is because people will buy the tickets no matter
| what, but even compared to other losing games the lottery comes
| away looking like an absolute bandit.
|
| A run on the simulation (n=1000000) comes back with -92% EV. It
| looks like -10% [1] is a rough estimate for slot machine EV,
| which I would ballpark into the same game genre (-EV, no skill
| entertainment) as the lottery.
|
| What accounts for this payout discrepancy in what I would
| consider similar games? On that train of thought, what prevents a
| new lottery from coming in and offering a _generous_ -50%
| lottery, offering ~5x as much money as before?
|
| [1]* https://www.888casino.com/blog/expected-value
| elseweather wrote:
| In the US at least they're a state monopoly
| serf wrote:
| >On that train of thought, what prevents a new lottery from
| coming in and offering a _generous_ -50% lottery, offering ~5x
| as much money as before?
|
| federal-level gambling syndicate isn't something that a private
| party can easily jump into.
|
| so the answer is : a mix of 'grandfather'd-in' and
| protectionism, if we're talking U.S. here.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The EV is so low because you didn't hit the jackpot once, and
| probably didn't even hit the 1 million. Really rare impactful
| events can really modify linear averages by a lot.
|
| Try it over 1,000,000,000 tickets.
|
| (The EV of the MegaMillions should hover around 50%)
| cataflam wrote:
| Because you shouldn't use the simulator to calculate the EV, or
| said differently your n=1000000 is too small.
|
| Assuming you used the first lottery example (Mega Millions),
| the EV is easy to calculate directly and is -$0.66/ticket, ie
| -33%
|
| The jackpot is a whole $1 of that EV! Without it, the EV is
| -$1.75/ticket, ie -87%, which is closer to what you got in the
| simulation.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Does this have any way of simulating multiple plays per draw? I'm
| curious what happens to EV when you buy X tickets per draw
| instead of just 1. And for both circumstances: (a) ensure all X
| tickets are unique and (b) random entries with replacement.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Humans are so weird... No matter how simple you make a slot
| machine, for some reason it's still compelling to play.
|
| On one of my runs, I won $1 million which put my numbers in the
| green for a while before slowly going into the red again.
|
| That's going to legitimately brighten the rest of my day.
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