I mentioned to a colleague that I’d bought two lottery tickets for last weeks Euromillions draw instead of my usual 1 to double my chance at winning. He said “Yeah, that’s not how it works.” I’m sure he is right – but why?
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Well sure you double the chances of you having a winning ticket. Two is double one. And a lot of the responses get overly mathy trying to explain it. What I’m not seeing much of though is that the probability doesn’t really shift. If it’s one in a million per ticket it stays one in a million for both tickets. Buying a million tickets won’t guarantee a win.
Odds aren’t determined by the set number (sticking with 1 in a million, there aren’t just a million combinations of numbers, there’s way more). Plus most lotteries don’t have guaranteed wins *and* they have incremental wins. So that 1 in a million is that you win anything at all. Maybe it’ll be the buck you paid, maybe it’ll be the jackpot. And that’s where lotteries really get you. Each win between 1 and jackpot slashes the odds. To win the jackpot would be say 1 in 500 million. And winning nothing at all is the 500 million, not the 1.
So you’ve doubled your chances to get anything but the chance of getting nothing per ticket is still astronomically high. And “double” a tiny miniscule amount is statistically insignificant.
Either way, good luck. It’s fun to dream and there’s always a chance.
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