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This is literally the worst piece of advice about the lottery ever given

Jan 11, 2016, 21:49 IST

On Monday morning, liberal media watchdog group Media Matters tweeted a screenshot allegedly from Fox News advising a simple strategy for maximizing your chances of winning the lottery: Buy as many tickets as you can afford.

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This is technically true. Buying more lottery tickets does increase your chances of winning the lottery. In Powerball, there are 292,201,338 possible tickets. Buy one ticket, and you have a one in 292,201,338 chance of winning the jackpot. Buy two tickets, you have a two in 292,201,338 chance. And so on.

Even though buying more tickets technically increases your chances of winning, buying as many tickets as you can is probably a really bad idea.The first problem is that your likelihood of winning is still incredibly low, even if you buy a bunch of tickets. Your odds of being struck by lightning in the next year are about 120 times higher than a two in 292,201,338 chance. Buying 10 tickets and giving yourself a 10 in 292,201,338 chance still leaves you about six times as likely to die in a plane crash as you are to win Powerball.An even bigger problem is that this is a monumentally terrible idea from a financial perspective. Assuming you take the lump sum, which you likely should, and factoring in taxes, each one of those tickets has a negative expected value, meaning that each lottery ticket represents a likely loss of money. Buying more tickets, then, just increases the amount of money you're likely to lose.Buying a ton of lottery tickets, while making your chances of winning the jackpot marginally better, is a terrible "strategy."

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