re: Cashier at store told me one guy has spent $4000 on Powerball

quote:

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Slackster, there is a distinction in statistics between probability and odds. Not quite OT material but this might help.

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Thank you, and that is what I mentioned in the edit of my post. However, that is not how the Powerball quotes its odds on its website. They explicitly state the "odds" of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338. In the traditional since of "odds", that should read 1:292,201,337, much like a coin flip landing on heads has the probability of 50% and odds of 1:1. The Powerball website and any 'odds' you see quoted there are called odds but are in fact probabilities listed as fractions. They say the odds are 1 in 292,201,338, but that actually represents the total successes, 1, over the total possibilities, 292,201,338.

Considering they use probabilities in the place of odds on their website, I don't see any reason for my math to have been incorrect or stated poorly in this thread, but this is the OT so I don't expect many people to have much of an understanding one way or the other.