Today, the winning ticket will be drawn for the Rotary Hospice House Show Home Lottery. The owner of one of the 10,000 tickets sold will be the lucky owner of a brand-new home.
On the surface, betting $100 to win a home worth about half a million dollars sounds pretty decent but the probability of winning (1 in 10,000 or 0.0001 per cent) is not so great.
As far as licensed gambling goes, however, those are actually pretty good odds and it benefits a great local cause. And for the 9,999 ticket holders who didn't win, the Prince George Spruce Kings home lottery starts next week. Also a great cause, same $100 buy-in.
It's best to just look at these tickets as non-tax-deductible donations to these charities with a puny chance of winning the big prize.
Same goes with buying lottery tickets. Consider it a donation to the government to help pay for schools and hospitals or a voluntary tax that comes with the miniscule likelihood of landing a life-changing windfall.
Last year, someone paid that tax at a store in Burnaby and their numbers came up. All seven numbers matched on their Lotto Max ticket for a $1 million Maxmillions prize. The problem is that whomever bought that ticket hasn't come forward to claim their prize. If it's not claimed at the B.C. Lottery Corporation office in Kamloops or Vancouver by 4:30 tomorrow afternoon, that prize will be lost, since the winner has one year to come forward.
According to the BCLC, this will be the first time the top lottery prize has not been claimed in B.C. Earlier this year, a $219,912.60 prize went unclaimed. Other prizes of similar value went unclaimed in the province in 2006, 2008 and 2009.
For this unclaimed Maxmillion ticket, matching all seven numbers on a $5 play are one in 28,633,528 or 0.0000034924 per cent.
These are ridiculous odds.
As a 2009 CBC story explained, the odds of getting killed in a terrorist attack while travelling are one in 650,000, the odds of dying of flesh-eating disease are one in a million and the odds of being hit by a bolt of lightning are one in 56,439. People are three times more likely to be killed in a car accident driving 16 kilometres to buy a Lotto Max ticket than they are of winning the Lotto Max.
Even the subsidiary prizes don't favour the player. The probability of hitting five out of seven numbers on a $5 play on the Lotto Max is one in 1,584, which is better than holding the winning show home lottery ticket but the prize is worth substantially less. A winning ticket with five out of seven correct numbers on the same line of last Friday's Lotto Max came with a $107.90 payout.
Yet buying lottery tickets does have some value, particularly once the jackpots go ridiculously high.
Poker players talk about value bets. Some hands are worth betting on, even if your hand is weak, because the size of the bet is small, based on the value of the pot.
Both poker players and statisticians know the odds of hitting the Lotto Max are ridiculously small, yet a $5 bet when the jackpot has maxed out at $60 million and there are dozens of MaxMillions draws on the side provides slightly better odds.
Although the probability of winning the jackpot only improves from zero to a ridiculously small fraction that might as well be zero, a $5 bet that is not a hardship to the player makes sense.
If the $5 won't be missed in any way, then the value of the bet is nothing to the player but the potential benefit is enormous.
That's a classic value bet.
Lotteries should be played for fun, not to win or as part of a retirement earnings plan. Local lotteries and draws should also be played for fun, with the knowledge that the money allows area charities and non-profits groups to continue doing their important work. There should be no expectation of winning because there is statistically almost no chance of it happening.
From the CBC, here's a visual way to decide how to play.
If a friend blindfolded you, led you out onto a football field, handed you a pin and asked you to stroll around a bit before pushing the pin in the ground, the probability that you would stab the ant your friend released onto the field before you got there are one in 14 million.
That's the odds of winning the Lotto 6/49 and it's double the possibility of winning the Lotto Max.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
