It is everyone’s dream to some day win a large sum of money in a jackpot, but the big question is, what are the odds of winning a jackpot.
Millionaires have been known to emerge from lottery game across the world, be it from gambling or from a show.
Lotteries are a way of giving back to society, though involves raking in profits also for the organizers.
Lotteries may require you to pay a certain amount, before you are allowed to play for the big win; these amount may however be for the purchase of a lottery ticket, for example — for the chance to win a prize, such as a large sum of money or even a coin, which enables you play in the casino.
Every lottery is a game of chance, they do not involve or require having any special skill but rather, it is a game of luck… Yes, winning a lottery largely depends on luck! There a various types of lotteries today, from the simple “50/50″ raffle draws at local events (the winner gets 50% of the proceeds from the total tickets sold), to multi-state lotteries with jackpots of several million dollars.
So what are your odds of winning the jackpot?
Probability is the likelihood of an event or more than one event occurring, this is why many people will walk into a casino with a lot of money and end up with nothing at the end of the day, while some others, will walk in with a token and leave with a much larger sum. Similarly, one can purchase more raffle tickets to increase their chances of winning a sum of money, meanwhile, luck might shine on the one who only bought one ticket and vice versa.
For example, in a lottery which requires you to pick 6 numbers from a possible pool of 49 numbers, your chances of winning the jackpot (correctly choosing all 6 numbers drawn) are 1 in 13,983,816. That is 1 shot in almost 14 million. If you were to buy one lottery ticket each week in such a scenario, you could expect to win once every 269,000 years.
Another example by the International Game Technology PLC (IGT), a multinational gambling company that produces slot machines and other gambling technology, the odds of winning the jackpot is approximately 1 in 50 million. For example, suppose you have a slot machine with three reels having ten symbols on each, and it only pays out when three cherries hit. The odds of winning that jackpot, as we determined earlier, is 1/1000. If we set the jackpot as $900, and charge $1 per bet, the payout percentage for that game will be 90%, or $900/$1000.
Sadly, many lotteries have even worse odds than the scenarios mentioned above. For example, the popular Mega Millions multi-state lottery has odds of approximately 1 in 175,711,536.
Still tempted by the possibility of winning hundreds of millions in a jackpot?
The truth is, there is no way to predict the numbers that will come up in the lottery. The drawings are largely random, even though various websites and software developers claim to have created techniques to generate likely lottery numbers.
While many may consider the lottery as a sort of entertainment to try their luck, many others use it as a means of get-rich scheme. This may however be far fetched, but no man knows when luck will come smiling, the reason, why many keep playing the lotteries.
Th National Weather Service, in a report it once released, said, you are 20,000 times more likely of being struck by lightning at some point in your lifetime than you are to win the Mega Millions jackpot. But this is not to say people have not won the lottery, in fact, in 2007, two people split a $390 million Mega Millions jackpot, the world’s largest jackpot ever.
However, the odds against that happening to you are astronomical, but as an alternative, you may consider investing whatever monies meant for playing the lottery, or saving them outrightly. This in itself, can be considered a win, like the saying goes, a bird in hand, is worth two in the bush.