Lotteries

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As my late father once put it, "For a dollar, you buy a dream."

The odds of winning are extremely low, but spending a couple bucks on a ticket instead of a candy bar is inconsequential... with tiny odds of a life-changing event.

Of course any odds are better than the ZERO chance when you don't play.

Trying the Daily Game w/the numbers is the best game, I think.

I love that lottery song I came up above.

As I said in another thread, I won $10 w/a $1 scratch ticket today. Amazing stuff.

My wife and I won third division many years ago in the Australian tattslotto it was $1600.00 from a10 dollar ticket.

Species5618 has a point about the utility value of money, but I'm not at all convinced that the expected return of playing the lottery is ever positive, even in utility terms. It's hard to say, subjectively, whether $1,000,000 has 1,000,000x the utility of $1 or 500,000x or 2,000,000x, but the law of diminishing marginal utility is on mutley's side here.

Besides, many of the people who win serious money (millions) in lotteries end up worse-off than they were before. So it may indeed be a "life-changing event" for them, just not in the direction they expected.

There are some here: http://amberalonzo.blogspot.com/2007/06 ... ttery.html
More here: http://askville.amazon.com/winning-lott ... d=11105830
A scientific paper: http://www.uky.edu/~swhank2/research/lo ... ruptcy.pdf

By the way, I'm not suggesting that a negative outcome is the most likely, just that it happens. I suspect most lottery winners are better off, it's just not as interesting for journalists to write about, since it seems obvious.

I play TV bingo from time to time, it supports local charity and I at least get an hour of entertainment out of the deal since my luck is garbage. Thats the extent of my gambling.

^ Me too.

Sometimes, I play bingo, and I did one something; $25.

I always get scratch tickets on my birthday. If the total "win" money is less than € 50 I'll turn it in for more scratch tickets until I either win € 50+ or all my win money is depleted.

Jeez, I haven't won anything from the lottery in a while....... but I still love it.

Since I first wrote this, I actually won $109 from $10 worth of scratch tickets last Christmas. Yay, me.

I'm fine with people trying their luck, but I've always thought any form of gambling was just a tax on people who can't calculate probability. Poker is an exception, since there are real skills involved in being really good at it, but I never really bothered with lottery tickets. My grandpa used to buy them, and he'd let me scratch them off. I also bought one on my 18th birthday, just to say that I did. But beyond that, I don't see a point.