re: powerball odds - help me win my argument - posted pg 8

I've been playing the same numbers for 23 years and ain't won shite, so there ya go. And being I know them by heart I can NEVER stop playing them.

The odd are so astronomically high there is little use in even talking about any scenarios.

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He claims that over a long period of time it adds an extra X variable if you change you numbers every week and the variables which is simply not true.

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Pathological gamblers are more vulnerable to the illusion of control in a standard associative learning task
Is your friend a pathological gambler?

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quote: He claims that over a long period of time it adds an extra X variable if you change you numbers every week and the variables which is simply not true. Pathological gamblers are more vulnerable to the illusion of control in a standard associative learning taskIs your friend a pathological gambler?

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No he does not gamble. He is just trying to relate things that we leadned in school about "depent and independent" variables i guess.


I also looked it up online to try and show him he was not correct and i came across a guy with a PHD statistics who claimed to argue his way. No idea how he could have been arguing it, but my onky guess could be that with such astronomical odds maybe something is affected if the PHD student said so as well.


In my opinion the odds are unaffected and in the comments everyone called the PHD student an idiot in the comments, so ill stick to my argument.

Yeah ... I started like a 50 page thread that has since been locked a few years block about something on the tv show deal or no deal that was similar..

Basically the contestant is faced with 30 boxes at the beginning of the show and his goal is to pick the one with 1 million dollars ... So he has a 1/30 chance of picking right or a 29/30 chance of picking wrong ... The contestant goes through the show eliminating one box at a time .. At the end there are only his box and one box on the stage left ---- should he switch ... I said of course (and had a ton of people agreeing with me) .. Although in my heart I still think I was right some phd came in the thread and showed me the math to say in made zero difference

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I always argue with my friend about it who is also studying engineering and is a "math guy" , so i can not understand why he can not agree with me on the correct answer of all the odds being the same no matter what.

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Man, that's really annoying. Each drawing is separate from the other. It's just as likely to draw the same exact numbers Wednesday as it did on Saturday than it is to draw any other combination.

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Odds aren't good to win. They're like 1 in 16.

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You're stupid. Everyone knows power play makes it close to 50/50.

Correct. The Monty Hall rule doesn't apply because the winning box is never made known before hand .,,

But to me after the contestant makes his initial selection there are two groups ... Group one is the contestants box and group two is the other 29 boxes ... The odds that the million is in the contestants box (or group one) is 1/30 .. Odds that the million is in group two is 29/30. To me, it doesn't matter how many boxes you remove or not from group two - the odds are still 29/30 that the million is in that group

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Basically the contestant is faced with 30 boxes at the beginning of the show and his goal is to pick the one with 1 million dollars ... So he has a 1/30 chance of picking right or a 29/30 chance of picking wrong ... The contestant goes through the show eliminating one box at a time .. At the end there are only his box and one box on the stage left ---- should he switch ... I said of course (and had a ton of people agreeing with me) .. Although in my heart I still think I was right some phd came in the thread and showed me the math to say in made zero difference

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There is a case where if you have 3 doors (1 with 1 million dollars, 2 with nothing) and you chose door number 1 and you are shown one of the doors (say door number 2) that has 0$ in it you should switch to the other door.

This is because you had a 33% chance at the beginning, but now there is at least a 50% chance that door number 3 has the million, while door number 1 still has a 33% chance of having the million.

But i think with deal or nondeal it is different because you are now shown one of the bad cases without having to make a choice. Not sure tho.



Any chance you could find the link to that thread? I would like to read it.

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Many people argue about powerball odds - your opinion

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Any person's chances of winning the Powerball are pretty much the same regardless of whether or not they buy a ticket.