If you buy a lotterie ticket that has a 1:100000 chances to win you have a 1:1000000 chance. If you buy two tickets, you have 2:1000000 or 1:500000 chance. Why can I eliminate 500.000 tickets with just one more ticket?
What am I conflating here?
Edit: Thank you guys, this was always something I started wondering about.
In: 0
I’m going to shrink the numbers so that I don’t have to count zeroes.
If a lottery has a 1:10 chance to win, then that means there are 10 tickets in total available.
If 11 people want to buy tickets, tough shit, one of them can’t.
There are only 10 possible numbers.
And you have one of them.
If you buy a second ticket, then you have 2 tickets, but there are still only 10 tickets in total, and you own 1/5 of them.
You haven’t “eliminated” 5 tickets.
Saying that your odds have improved to 1:5 means that if there *were* only 5 tickets and you had only 1 ticket, then your chances of winning would be the same as when you have 2 tickets out of a total of 10.
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