Yeah, the privacy aspect was my primary reason..... not sure how taxes would come into play in that scenario, but yeah I think I can get by on that initial 100M + annual interest I honestly hope like 20+ different people win
South Carolina is one of the few states where the winner is allowed to take their prize without coming forward publicly, so this works out amazingly well for that person. They can take the $500 million or so after taxes in cash and disappear, with no worries about being harassed by family, friends, investment advisors, scammers, etc.
One person?! HOLY . . . son of a bitch! And anonymity in place. Wow, just wow, you can't make it up. I'm not sure how it works, but with a jackpot like that people who got 5 numbers are gonna get a couple of million, maybe three. It already happened before this latest drawing that quite a few people won a million each. Even if you get 4 numbers and the mega number/last number whatever you call it, you're still probably talking in the thousands. Oh, well, time to quick pick Powerball! As of yesterday when I went to get a cup of coffee at the convenience store it was up to $620 million.
Yeah, big money, lol. Oh,well, at least I broke even! People were playing hundred of dollars at a time. @statjeff22 this one's for you: I honestly don't think it increases your chances as much as people may think. Incrementally at best because the odds are so ridiculous?
It increases it multiplicatively - buy 10 tickets, you have 10 times the chances of winning. Of course, that's still only 1 in 30 million, much lower than the chances of a person dying in a shark attack over the course of their lifetime (that's about 1 in 8 million). You're also spending $20 instead of $2.
How many number combinations can there be? Isn't it like 1-75? Not quite sure how to do the math, but it is interesting that it is so tough to play. I don't play the lottery, so don't know much about it.
It's basic combinatorics. There are 70 regular numbers, and 5 are chosen in a drawing. There are "70-choose-5" different possible ways of doing that, where n-choose-k is n!/[k!(n-k)!], and the "!" represents factorial (m! = m x (m-1) x (m-2) x (m-3) X ... X 3 X 2 X 1 for any integer m). That turns out to be 12,103,014. If you get those five numbers right you get $1 million on a $2 bet. To win the jackpot, however, you also have to get the Mega Ball right, which is a separate number chosen out of 1 to 25. That means that there are 12,103,014 X 25 = 302,575,350 possible sets of winning numbers.
Wow, thanks for explaining, Jeff. Way more than I thought. Okay, so it really is near impossible to win. Yeah, I think winning Mega Millions is actually much easier.
Combinatorics! Great word - first time I've ever seen it. Is it real or is it for the BS section of TGG only? Further exploration reveals it is indeed real and Philippe Flajolet was considered the Father of Analytic Combinatorics until his untimely passing at the prime (number?) of his career in 2011. There may be an opening for you, Statjeff, as the Uncle of Combinatronics!
The version of combinatorics I'm referring to is enumerative combinatorics, which is all about how to count things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumerative_combinatorics This is quite old, going back more than 2000 years. Indeed, Euclid mentioned an early application of it in the 4th century BC.
