 In this well-known Canadian lottery, six different numbers are randomly drawn from a set of balls with numbers 1 through 49. What are your chances of holding a winning ticket? order or arrangement of the numbers doesn't matter) You have one chance in 13,983,816 of winning. The probability is 0.0000000715 The more tickets you buy, the greater your chance of winning, of course. Suppose you buy 50 tickets (which will cost you $50). Your chances of winning go up ... they're now a whopping 50 out of 13,983,816, for a probability of 0.000003575 (not much of an improvement!) The first winning ticket is the one where you match three numbers. The probability of this occurring turns out to be 0.018, or 1.8%, or about 2 out of 100, or about 1 out of 50. This means you must spend about $50 on average, to hope to win the $10. Are you beginning to get the picture? Your chances of winning the big prize are next to nothing, and the chances of winning even $10 are only one in fifty. Yet people win all the time, of course, because millions of tickets are sold every week, and somebody has to win the prizes. It's just not very likely that it will be any one person in particular (ie: you!) By the way, if you play Lotto 649 twice a week, every week, for the next thousand years, your chances of winning the big jackpot are still only about one percent! |