Office Lottery Pool
Suppose you want to increase your chances of winning the lottery jackpot by pooling money with a group of coworkers. There are several issues you should keep in mind.
When you pool the money and you hit the jackpot, the money has to be split. If you bought 10,000 tickets and the jackpot that you win is $100 million, then each ticket is entitled to a mere $10,000. Your chances of hitting the jackpot in the first place are 1 in 17,500 and you’re not going to get rich off what you win.
Perhaps you’d be satisfied with a small profit. However, as I calculated in my previous piece on the subject, even if you include the jackpot in the calculation of the expected return, the Mega Millions game never had, and probably never will have a positive return.
Despite this fact, people continue to pool money in the hopes of winning big. However, there are more problems in doing this than just its non-profitability.
Consider a scenario. Your coworkers collected $1,000 to buy 1,000 lottery tickets. You give the money to Jerry who buys the tickets. Jerry can go to a store and buy 1,005 tickets. After the lottery he checks the tickets, takes the best five for himself and comes back to work with 1,000 disappointing tickets.
It is more likely that Jerry is cheating or that he will lose the tickets than it is that your group will win the jackpot. But there is a probabilistic way to check Jerry’s integrity. According to the odds, every 40th ticket in Mega Millions wins something. Out of 1,000 tickets that Jerry bought, you should have about 25 that win something. If Jerry systematically brings back tickets that win less often than expected, you should replace Jerry with someone else.
There are methods to protect your group against cheating. For example, you can ask another person to join Jerry in purchasing the tickets, which they then seal in an envelope that they both sign.
Alternatively, you yourself could be the person responsible for buying 1,000 tickets. How would you protect yourself from suspicion of cheating? The same way as I mentioned above: bring along some witnesses and have everyone sign the sealed envelope.
The most reliable way to prevent Jerry from cheating is to have him write down all the ticket numbers and send this information to everyone before the drawing. This way he can’t replace one ticket with another. But this is a lot of work for tickets that are usually worth less than the money you collected to buy them.
But there are other kinds of dangers if you use this supposedly reliable method. If you bought a lot of tickets the probability of winning a big payoff increases. Suppose Jerry publicly locks the envelope in a desk drawer in his office. If one ticket wins $10,000, and everyone knows all the ticket combinations, suddenly Jerry’s desk drawer becomes a very unsafe place to keep the tickets.
Scams are not your only worry. You shouldn’t buy the same combination twice — whether picking randomly or not. You really do not want to waste a ticket and end up sharing the jackpot with yourself.
You cannot change the odds of hitting the jackpot, but you can change the odds of sharing it with others. Indeed, there are people who do not buy random combinations, but rather pick their favorite numbers, like birthdays. You can reduce the probability of sharing the jackpot if you choose the combinations for your tickets wisely, by picking numbers that other people are unlikely to pick.
Still want to try the lottery? If you feel a need to throw your money away, instead of buying lottery tickets, feel free to donate to this blog.
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Andrew MW:
“You really do not want to waste a ticket and end up sharing the jackpot with yourself.” – that would be ok if a third ticket won as well… then you would get a larger portion of the jackpot. Still, I’m sure it’s not worth buying that extra ticket for the possible additional payoff!
5 February 2010, 3:08 amThomas:
We had a funny situation at work a few years back. We all put in $10 to buy tickets for the upcoming $10 million lotto draw.
19 February 2010, 10:53 amA few more people wanted to join shortly before the actual tickets were going to be purchased. The comment was made that each additional person sharing the pool would dilute the $10 million we were going to win for the rest of us. Since there were ten of us originally, any additional player would cost us about $100,000 each. Therefore any new players should be required $900,000 before we let them join in :-).
Jonathan:
In the pools I’ve seen (but declined to play in, of course) each player chooses numbers and “Jerry” bought the same tickets each week.
20 February 2010, 10:29 amRobin:
That very reason is why I joined Lotto Magic. Not only can the pool grow as large as we want, we still get paid at least 10% of the winnings. Plus there is no “Jerry” to steal the winnings. Everyone knows the lottery numbers ahead of time.
8 July 2011, 1:14 pmBill:
If you are managing a lottery pool for colleagues, family, friends, etc. There is only ONE website that offers you the tools to track your tickets and send automated results for YOUR pool to you AND your members via text message, email or both. It is the ONLY website in the world that does this.
Hurry and sign up for your free account while it’s still free. I hear they will be charging a small membership fee in the near future. HURRY!!
http:/www.lotterypoolmanager.com
9 November 2011, 4:02 pmBill:
The Bill who posted above is not me.
17 November 2011, 8:22 pm