"Never tell me the odds" - Han Solo

In the lead up to the BIG one I bought a Big Wednesday lotto ticket. I could do with 36 million dollars and I don’t care what the experts say, I guarantee that if I’da won, I’d be substantially happier than I am at the moment.

I get a bit sick of the number manipulators telling us the odds of winning lotto are a million squazillion to one, a similar chance to being hit by lightening 16 times in your life, or the same odds as being discovered in a Pac n Save store by George Clooney and swept off to live with him in his California mansion (same column above).

The statisticians salivate over boring us with the odds of actually winning lotto. I guess they have to justify their salaries somehow.

I reckon the odds of winning are actually pretty simple. Either I will win or I won’t. In my book that makes the odds 50/50, which are actually pretty good.

Some smart person once said – I’m paraphrasing here, and in no way claiming it as mine – that if the chances of winning the lottery were the same as being hit by an asteroid, how come someone isn’t hit by an asteroid every week?

It’s true, isn’t it, that nearly every week somebody wins a pretty hefty amount of cash on Lotto. Last week a “normal” family won $36 million. Recently someone else won 5 million. Nearly every Saturday somebody wins a million.

So, if every week somebody wins lotto, why would it not be me? If it HAS to be someone, why not me? Exclude those few people trying to tip the "odds" by spending a forune on tickets, and if you have Joe Average spending twenty or thirty bucks on a random numbers ticket, don’t we each have similar odds? I’m no mathematician, but if we mostly have similar odds, then it could as easily be me who wins as not. Isn’t that a 50/50 chance?

“Odds” implies a certain non-randomness. If the “odds” are one in 2.7 million, then a win is guaranteed if I attempt lotto 2.7 million times. But if lotto is TRULY random, as it is purported to be, then “odds” does not apply. It cannot apply. I could try lotto 70 million times and still not win. But equally I could win on the very first try. It’s like flipping a coin. Statistically, because it is random, I could flip a thousand coins and never guess the right result. Or I could guess it right each time. Overall, the odds MIGHT be stretched as the number of tries grows, but each individual attempt is simply 50/50. The only valid statistic remains the I-might-or-might-not-win one.

Of course, there is one other relevant statistic when it comes to lotto. It is the one guarantee in relation to lotto. If you don’t have a ticket, you definitely won’t win.

I don’t buy a lotto ticket every week. Someone said if you put the twenty bucks you’d spend on lotto in a tin every week, you’d be a thousand bucks better off at the end of the year. That may be true, even if a bit mind-numbingly dull.

Powerball is up to about 4 million again this week, I think. I’m in. Hey, with 50/50 odds, why not?