Chances of Winning the Lottery

For the past few days, I've been monitoring the lotto winning combinations and I always wonder: "will I win? Not if I don't try!"

I always check the lotto results here: Philippine Lotto Results.

What's great with that website is, it has an archive of previous winning combinations that makes it easier for you to analyze past winning combinations. BUT, even though you are a great statistician or mathematician, it doesn't matter. This game is purely based on luck. You can project the probablity but I am 100% sure it won't be accurate because a small margin of error can make the whole difference.

Last Sunday, I just spent 300 pesos betting and today, I spent around 100 pesos.

So, What is the probability that I will win the lottery tonight? (A short research on statistics)

I got this article from a forwarded email.

It's time to take a long hard look at the chances of you winning the lottery. While winning the lottery may be something that you want, to show you your chances we'll take a look at a number of remote occurrences that you probably wouldn't like to have happen to you - and probably don't think will ever happen to you - but are still much more likely to happen to you than winning the lottery.

How about the classic odds of being struck by lightning? The actual probability of this happening varies from year to year, but as a good estimate, the National Safety Council says between 70 and 120 people a year die in the US by lightning - so let's take 100 as our base. With the US population being approximately 265 million people, that means that the chances of being killed by lightning are roughly 2,650,000 to 1. Not very likely. However you are still 6 to 45 times more likely to die from a lightning strike than you would be to win the lottery.

Now nobody really wants to die from flesh eating bacteria, and with odds at about 1 million to 1, the chances that you will die that way are pretty slim. Then again, you are 18 to 120 times more likely to die this way than to win the lottery.

What are the chances that if you're playing with a group of four that two of you will get a hole-in-one on the exact same hole? At 17 million to 1, they're better than the chances of you winning the lottery.

What about being killed from a snake bite or bee sting? It probably isn't a way that you have imagined the way you would leave earth. You're a whopping 180 to 1,200 times more likely to die from one of these incidents than win the lottery. That's because the probability of dying from a snake bite or bee sting is about 100,000 to 1.

Now I know that you are not a bad person and you don't imagine finding yourself in death row for a crime you will committ anytime soon. Still, it's a lot more likely that you will be legally executed than win the lottery. In fact, you are 30,000% to 200,000% more likely to die in a legal execution than to win the lottery.

Or if I told you that you were 450,000 to 3,000,000 times more likely to die in an asteroid collision in the year 2029 than to win the lottery, what would you think? Well, these are in fact the odds according to this report at space.com.

If none of the above has convinced you to stop playing the lottery, then I'll bring out my favorite lottery fact. If you drive 10 miles to purchase your lottery ticket, it's three to twenty times more likely for you to be killed in a car accident along the way than to win the jackpot.

So, there you go. Don't do what I did. Just spend the money on food and other necessities. Imagine, 100 bucks a week can turn into more or less 5,000 pesos a year!

Good luck to us who still decided to play!