Lottery Math

Dont know why i did this but i noticed that Powerball is up to $94m for the jackpot and had to work out some of the lottery math.

So as you can see here are the odds on winning with fixed prizes for everything except for the jackpot which increases each week if no one wins.

So if you were to take $2000 and play 1,000 games at $2 each
- you would most likely win $138 based on all possible combinations for percentages under 1,000 games (however not guaranteed).

Interestingly the numbers get more interesting when you include the percentages for slim chance in the 4+1 and 5 balls in that the ROI doubles to $361 however most likely you wont win this kind of ROI at only 1,000 chances.

At the current jackpot the ROI on your $2000 spent is only $897 its not until the jackpot gets to $285m that you get an even return of $2,000 (though most likely you will lose money......)

To get to a $285m jackpot you would need to have no winner for 10 weeks and before that it's all gravy for the powerball folks with odds stacked way in their favor (though as the jackpot prize goes up people go crazy eg with the $450m jackpot a few months ago where it went up $80m in a single week) so its not a flat increase in the odds over 10 straight weeks.