re: Powerball now officially up to 1.4 Billion, up from 1.3

Why wouldn't you? That doubles your chances of winning.

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even if they would, what idiot would do this for half the tickets?

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True.

Obviously buying all of the tickets is the only way to guarantee a win, but I suppose theoretically you could eliminate the tickets that seem impossible - tickets with successive numbers for instance.

I'm aware that the odds for 1,2,3,4,5 white numbers and any Powerball number are the same for any other combination, but it certainly feels like it is a waste of money to buy those combinations. Eliminating all successive numbers in the white balls would save you from buying 1,690 tickets. You could also eliminate other patterns like 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, and 51 or 2,4,6,8,10, etc. Regardless, you're still going to be buying a shitload of tickets and those combinations are just as likely as any other, no matter how plausible it may seem.

LINK

The best part: You can deduct the value of your gambling losses up to the amount of your winnings. So all but two bucks of what you spent on tickets would be tax-deductible. Effectively that deduction means you'd wipe out any federal taxes owed on the first $584 million of your winnings.

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can deduct the value of your gambling losses up to the amount of your winnings. So all but two bucks of what you spent on tickets would be tax-deductible. Effectively that deduction means you'd wipe out any federal taxes owed on the first $584 million of your winnings.

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Not entirely true


You'd have way more than one winning ticket, but you'd likely to get write off the large majority of the tickets

All I know is that if I win, they better not give me some little pussy check like this.



I want the biggun

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You'd have way more than one winning ticket, but you'd likely to get write off the large majority of the tickets

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Even the winning tickets cost $2 to play, so if you can write off any of the money, I'd imagine you can write off the entire cost to play.

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even if they would, what idiot would do this for half the tickets?

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Apparently this has happened before in the Virginia State Lottery in 1992. The jackpot was $24M and there were ~7M possible combinations. A group from Australia was able to purchase approximately 5M tickets before time ran out and they ended up being the sole winner of the jackpot.

I'd imagine they were sweating bullets after spending $5M and still having a 28.5% chance of losing outright as well as the risk of having multiple winners.

LINK

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I think it was Vermont or some other NE state a while back. Had a game that would guaranteed payout after it hit a certain amount. A group would always buy all the numbers whenever it hit this amount and would make something like 400k or 500k. They discontinued/modified the game after the same group won like 3 or 4 times in a row.

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yeah up in the northeast somewhere. after a certain point of non winning, the odds lowered. some mathematicians figured it out. I think they spent about 40-50k on tickets and came out well ahead

Everyone you've ever known your entire life will suddenly be your best friend with a sob story. Or they have the best business deal ever devised and they want you to fund it.

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You have to buy Powerball tickets in person. That's a lot of transactions.
If you were able to buy one ticket every second, it would still take you more than nine years to buy every combination. And that's optimistic: You have to ensure that you buy every number just once -- not just 292 million quick-picks.
Even if you could deploy an army of people to buy all those tickets for you, it's still extremely unlikely that you'd be able to buy every ticket.
"Think about how many lottery ticket stations there are nationwide and how busy they've been, running nonstop over the past three days," said Matheson. "Even still, they were only able to sell 440 million tickets."
Buying every lottery combination has actually been tried once.
In February 1992, an Australian consortium tried to corner a $24 million Virginia Lotto jackpot. But the group was only able to purchase 2.4 million of the 7 million combinations before time ran out.
So though it's technically feasible to guarantee yourself a lottery victory, realistically, it's not.

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basically that article could have started and ended with "No"