Should you play California lottery? by Dmitry Pavlov
Added February 13, 2006
Dmitry Pavlov
Well, you are into supporting education, aren't you? Then you should be playing the lottery, as the proceeds support education. However, the test results in the technologically reachest and wealthiest state in the whole country can make you cry --- we are the last in the Nation in science! So maybe the lottery is not particularly the right source for funding something which is the foundation of the whole nation's well-being for years to come? In any case, it looks like they are trying to make you feel good that you are spending the money for the noble cause, but in reality you shouldn't feel particularly proud that by playing you are supporting the education, the school will get virtually nothing from the money you spend and if you donate the money to school, I am sure they are going to find a better way of using them. But even if you don't think of education at all, should you play the lottery?
Odds and Ends
Elsewhere, I covered the topic of winning in casinos, in particular, the part that some of the games such as videopoker and blackjack, if you utilize the right strategy, are very close to breakeven or, with casino perks, you may even have a slight edge. This means that you are expected to leave the casino with roughly the same dollar amount as you entered it, on average. On average in turn means that if you take large enough population of people going into casinos and add up their winnings (or losses) after they leave the casino, the total will be around zero (breakeven), and how you do in particular inside this group is totally up to Lady Luck.
If you take California lottery, then the best odds you can find there are 1:3.12 or so, which means that your chances are heavily skewed from 1:1 towards not winning. They do disclose the odds fully as for instance, here. Their odds is just a probability of winning, however each winning has a dollar value, and to see how much is it that you are going to win or loose one needs to compute the expected value of winning, which is easy to do with a table like this and the definitions of the expected value --- you just add-up the probability of winning amount X by the probability of X (with odds 1:10 the probability is 1/11 etc) so that your winnings from this table are going to be around 3.2$ on the ticket that costs 5$. Pretty pathetic, and it only gets worse with worse odds.
The bottom line is that it is highly unlikely that you are going to be making any money playing the lottery, neither the schools are going to benefit, so advice here is simple: either go to Vegas where you can stretch your dollar, have fun and maybe even win, or donate to your favorite school, supporting the kids, and not the weird bureaucratic idea.
