(January 8, 2015 at 11:33 am)Heywood Wrote: What you should do instead is learn how to compute the expected value of a gambling transaction. When my son turned 18 he and I made a simple spreadsheet. In the spread sheet we would key in information about scratch tickets and claimed prized from the states website and use it to compute the actual value of a scratch ticket. The best scratch tickets that cost a dollar were worth 67 cents. These were from games in which a lot of tickets were sold but few or none of the big prizes had yet been claimed.
Yep - the EV of lottery games is terrible. You can play blackjack very, very badly before you approach the negative-EV of scratch tickets or the weekly draw.
