Are you good with numbers?

TITLE: Are you good with numbers?

INTRO: Last month, everyone was chasing after the 700 MILLION dollar Powerball Jackpot.

Like millions, one of my teammates was also eyeing it. Instead of buying few tickets on his own, he started a pool for the team. Initially, two people got interested. Being engineers, they started their research and analysis to maximize the probability of winning.

At coffee breaks, Powerball was the only topic of conversation. And soon enough most of the team was participating in the pool.

Since there was so much hype about it I decided to read up on Powerball and I came across some interesting things which I am going to share with you today.

BASICS: Let's start with some basics. Powerball is a multi-state lottery offered in about 44 states.

As a ticket buyer, you pick SIX numbers. 

5 numbers are the white ball numbers ranging 1-69.  6th number is the red ball number ranging 1-26.

You pay 2$ for one ticket and you can select your own numbers or do a quick pick where a machine picks random numbers for you.

The drawing happens TWICE a week and the JACKPOT IS WON by matching all five white ball numbers in any order and the red ball number.

And the odds of winning a jackpot are EXTREMELY LOW. The odds are 1 IN 292 MILLION.

The initial jackpot is set to 40 million. And if no one wins the jackpot, a large part from the sales of latest round of Powerball tickets is rolled over into the next jackpot. Therefore if no one wins consecutively, the jackpot gets huge as happened with the jackpot last month when it became 768 million because there was no winner for 21 consecutive drawings.

In the past, the jackpot never got so huge, it is a recent phenomenon.

Previously, the white ball range was 1 to 59 and the red ball range was 1 to 35 which resulted into slightly better odds of 1 in 175 million. Since odds were better, the jackpots didn't become huge as there was always a winner in the early drawings which turned out to be a BIG Problem for the lottery company.

It turns out players were done throwing away their money for smaller jackpots. As a result, Powerball sales slumped.

Powerball realized that huge jackpots attracted more people. Therefore, Powerball officials changed the game rules in October 2015. The new game was designed to “engineer” bigger jackpots so that buying frenzies can develop for huge jackpots like the jackpot last month.

By the way, the jackpot last month was the second largest jackpot not only in Powerball history but also it was the second biggest lottery jackpot in the U.S. history. The largest jackpot with the value of 1.5 billion dollars was also produced by Powerball last year in January.

HOW BAD ARE THE ODDS?

Let me give you an example. As per National Safety Council report, there were 1.25 fatalities for every 100 million driven miles in 2016.

Therefore, if you drive 2 miles to the store to buy your Powerball ticket, your chance of being killed or killing someone else is about 7 times greater than the chance of winning the Powerball Jackpot.

WHO ARE THE WINNERS AND WHO ARE THE REAL LOSER?

Besides that, one lucky person who wins the jackpot there are several known winners.

·         Federal Government (Lottery winnings are taxed at 39%)

·         State Governments (Lottery winnings are taxed at 5% in KS and states also get the direct share of lottery ticket sales)

·         Merchants that sell tickets (Gets commission for each ticket they sell, gets additional commissions if the winning lottery is from their store)

·         Lottery companies (They are not doing all this for free)

·         Advertisers and promoters (Paid by the lottery companies)

And the losers are millions of lottery ticket buyers who at the end of the drawing only gets a piece of paper.

Advocates of lottery say there are many benefits to the lottery, the big one being funding state-run programs. Critics of lottery say it's an unfair tax on poor and ignorant as rich don't buy the lottery. It can be considered a golden opportunity or a scam depending on which side you are.

CONCLUSION: So today you learned some basics of Powerball, how bad the odds of winning are and who are the winners and losers. So, if anyone here stops playing Powerball, you can thank me for saving your money. And if anyone here starts playing Powerball and surprisingly wins a jackpot, don’t forget my commission.

And about the people in my team who participated in the pool last month, I don’t know what happened to them but they all showed up for work the next day.