How else could he afford it?
^ who in their right mind would trust a liberal newspaper for financial advice? hacksaw.
Tomorrow’s winner is being told today that he has no chance of winning.
To be fair, in Ibiza nobody would care. Just a couple of more wasted teenagers
Sadly, I had been drinking legally for several years in 1999 (plus several years of drinking illegally of course).
I spent my teens in Russia, so no judgement here 
If I convert that to CAD, I could pretty much buy the entire Canadian oil industry, right?
To be honest, I don’t know if I would want to win $1.5B. Of course I’d like to have that cash sitting in my PA, but there would be enormous public and family pressure. The world would be leeching off you. I think it’s easy to say you could ignore all that, but I’m not sure that’s realistic.
There is a reason why lotto winners are not generally happier a few years out from their win. Some are even less happy. There are significant consequences to a windfall like that. Even more so in today society where ostentatious wealth is frowned upon.
On another note: can this be arb’d? 1 in 300,000,000 chance of winning, $1.5B payout. How much is a tix?
Could I just buy every possible combo for $300mm and walk away with the prize?
^ Come on geo. The people who are miserable after winning the lottery are typically uneducated trailer-trash who have no sense of fiscal responsibility. They win $5 or $6 million and think they can spend $750,000 per year for the rest of their lives. You are a worldly, well-educated financial professional. Sure, leeches will come out of the wordwork trying to get a piece of the pie, but I’m sure you already know who your true friends are and will be extremely generous with them anyway.
Is it still possible to buy a ticket? You can see how often I play lotto in the extreme insight of my question.
That was tried 10 or 15 years ago. They did end up winning the jackpot, as well as a bunch of partial jackpots, but several of the retailers they had lined up for printing their tickets backed out and they actually failed to purchase every possible combination and could have lost almost everything. I’ve heard the odds are 1 in 200 something million, so I assume that’s the number of possible combinations. At $2 per ticket, you’d have to layout $400+ million, so if the lottery is split you lose.
Yes, and a single ticket is $2.
So $2 times 300 million possible number combinations is only $600 million. Seems one could just buy the lottery. Would suck if there were other winning tix and you’d have to split the pot…
I believe you can buy until a few minutes before the drawing. I assume the drawing is sometime tonight.
Given the increased ticket sales for each larger jackpot, your ticket will never have a positive expected return. I considered it, but I won’t be buying on those grounds. Maybe if the income tax is repealled.
The 600 mill would go right back into the pot. So you wouldn’t be paying 600 to get 1.5bil (current pot) you’d be paying 600 to get 2.1bil (current pot + your purchase).
I assume taxes, split pots, and the practicality of printing that amount of tickets eliminates this option.
200 million would go towards the pot. This is the government we are talking about. The worst slots only keep 24% or so. The government…67%.
I don’t think the odds change depending on how many tickets are sold. Other than perhaps the odds of a split pot.
Which is why the expected return peaks and then declines as a pot grows. The expected return does change, eventually inversely to The pot because of the increased tickets sales. The number of tickets sold per drawing is a huge factor as the tickets sold surpasses the number of possible winning combinations. Something like a 97% chance of a winner tonight and the most probable out come is around 2.5 winners. Hahahaha
You could do that. There are 225m combinations.
Assuming it takes 20 seconds to fill out a combination, 75 million minutes, or 1.25 million hours to fill out all possible combinations.
You can probably get all the combinations filled out by the drawing tonight, if you hire 150,000 people right now, and get started.