Lottery ticket buyers and mathematicians seldom overlap, but if there’s one thing acknowledged by both groups is that the odds of winning are, to put it mildly, not in our favor.
Yet, every week, millions of people across the globe lay down their hard-earned cash at the altar of the lottery gods, often playing at the fastest payout online casino to maximize their chances.
Why? Well, the reasons are almost as rich and varied as the imagined uses for the winnings.
The Irresistible Power of “What If”
At the heart of the lottery’s appeal is the delicious, tantalizing “what if” that plays on repeat in our minds. What if you, yes, you, with your lucky rabbit’s foot and your specific set of numbers, beat the odds?
What if you could walk into your boss’s office and deliver a well-rehearsed, Hollywood-style resignation? The lottery feeds into our amazing ability to ignore stone-hard facts and delight in wish fulfillment.
In fact, there are a lot of logical fallacies at play here:
- Sunk-cost fallacy (“I can’t stop now, I’ve spent so much money on these tickets already!”)
- Survivorship bias (“I read so many stories about unlikely winners! I could be one of them.”)
- Gambler’s fallacy (“Ok, so I’ve lost a hundred times before, which means I’m more likely to win my next one!”)
- The correlation/causation fallacy (“Every time I’ve lost before, I was holding tickets with my right hand. If I take it with my left hand, I’m bound to win!”)
This all sounds silly until you find yourself at the other end of this delusion. Nobody is immunized against faulty logic, especially when it comes to potentially winning the jackpot.
But how likely is this “potential win” really is? Let’s compare the odds to some other unlikely events that may happen to you.
Comparing the Odds of Winning Lottery
When it comes to the lottery, your chances of winning are roughly 1 in several million, depending on the draw. That means that if the entire population of some small European country bought lottery tickets, only one citizen would claim the prize.
“Okay, sure. But what if that citizen is me?” you may ask. Let’s take a look at other rare phenomena.
Struck by Lightning
When you were a kid, you were probably afraid of many unlikely scenarios: getting lost in the Bermuda triangle, getting pulled under by quicksand, and getting hit by lightning.
The latter event is at least somewhat plausible, although the odds of getting struck by lightning in any given year are about 1 in 500,000.
This means that you’re several times more likely to get a jolt from the sky than claim the jackpot.
Being crushed by a meteor
If you want to get hit by something more exotic than lightning, why not a meteor? These cosmic bodies fall to Earth all the time, although usually they are so small that they completely burn up in the atmosphere.
Once in a while, a big enough meteor does make it all the way. In that case, there’s a 1 in 700,000 chance that it will land on top of you.
That’s right, it’s more sensible to prepare for a meteor dropping on your head than it is to fantasize about winning the lottery.
Shark Attacks
We’ll have to thank Spielberg for making shark attacks seem like part and parcel of the experience at sea, but the odds of being attacked by a shark are only about 1 in 11.5 million.
Yes, you’re slightly more likely to win certain lotteries than to have a personal encounter with the star of Jaws!
But just in case, if you’ve ever been bitten by a shark, it doesn’t mean that you have to go all in on lottery tickets. Unfortunately, Lady Luck doesn’t work like that.
Drowning in a bathtub
Drowning is usually cited as one of the worst ways to go, because we imagine this as a slow, terrifying process, with you remaining aware the entire time.
Imagine that happening in your own bath! In fact, you have a 1 in 840,000 chance of drowning in a bathtub. Slightly embarrassing but also surprisingly more likely than winning a lottery.
Dating a Supermodel
Okay, let’s talk about something less morbid for a change.
When we discuss extremely attractive people, we sometimes use the phrase “they won a genetic lottery”. But when it comes to the actual lottery, the chances of pulling the winning tickets are much lower.
If you are American, the odds of you dating a supermodel are about 1 in 88,000. That is to say, you’re more likely to be the subject of TMZ’s investigation into a celeb’s dating life than you are to pick a winning combination of numbers on your lottery ticket.
Becoming a saint
Turns out that winning a lottery will teach you more about patience and humility than being canonized. For a Catholic, the odds of becoming a saint are about twice as high as winning the lottery. 1 in 20 million, to be exact.
Giving Birth to Quadruplets
Do you know many twins? Probably a couple. If you’re lucky, you may have even seen triplets.
Chances are, you have yet to come across identical quadruplets. And yet you are three times as likely to give birth to your own personal quartet (1 in 15 million) as you are to win the lottery.
Judging by how expensive it is to raise one child, much less four children, you will probably be holding out hope for that jackpot, anyway.
Finding a four-leaf clover
If you’re superstitious, you probably think having a four-leaf clover is a great way of raising your chances of winning a lottery.
The likelihood of you finding this rarest of plants is about 1 in 10,000. That’s only 0.01%, which is still the highest possibility out of everything else we’ve listed above.
For the Price of a Coffee
So why do we keep playing the lottery despite the abysmal odds? Maybe it’s part of the human condition, our love for the what-ifs, the communal dreaming, the economic gamble, the hope, and the thrill.
Sure, the stock market might offer better odds, but does it let you fantasize about buying an island? Not the last time we’ve checked.
The world can be a tough place, and the lottery is like buying a tiny slice of hope. There’s a certain adrenaline rush in watching those numbers roll out, live or on TV, knowing there’s a slim chance they might read out your ticket.
Just be prepared to never find out what it’s like to become a surprise winner. And also, stay alert for those meteor showers. They’re far more likely, anyway.
