{"id":400525,"date":"2026-01-08T21:17:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T21:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/400525\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T21:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T21:17:08","slug":"website-plays-the-lottery-every-second-puts-the-pitiless-nature-of-probability-on-full-display","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/400525\/","title":{"rendered":"Website Plays the Lottery Every Second, Puts the Pitiless Nature of Probability on Full Display"},"content":{"rendered":"

The continued existence of lotteries is a demonstration of how little intuition humans have for probability. On some level, we all know that the chances of actually winning a life-changing payout are basically zero, but a whole lot of people buy tickets every week\u2014because you never know, you might just get lucky, right? Right??<\/p>\n

Nope.<\/p>\n

If you want a really good demonstration of why lottery ticket purchases are essentially a voluntary tax, look no further than a site called \u201cLottery Every Second\u201d, which, as its name suggests, simulates playing the lottery every second<\/a>. Or, more accurately, it simulates playing two lotteries every second: Powerball, one of the most popular such games in the USA, and EuroJackpot, a similar game that operates throughout Europe.<\/p>\n

The games work in broadly similar ways. Powerball<\/a> requires you to select five numbers between 1 and 69 (nice!) and a sixth between 1 and 26. To win a jackpot, all six must match those chosen randomly in a given draw. EuroJackpot<\/a> uses five numbers between 1 and 50 and two further numbers between 1 and 12; again, to win a jackpot, all the numbers you choose must match those drawn.<\/p>\n

\"Lottery\u00a9 Screenshot of Lottery Every Second <\/p>\n

It\u2019s pretty easy to work out the odds yourself: in the case of Powerball, you have a one in 69 chance of selecting each of the first five numbers correctly, and a one in 26 chance with the sixth. To get the chance of getting all six correct, you just multiply the individual probabilities together, which gives you a 1 in 292,201,338 chance of hitting the jackpot. As ever, the Europeans get a better deal, with a 1 in 139,838,160 chance.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t sound too bad, does it? Well, this is the thing: as Lottery Every Second\u2019s accompanying text points out, \u201cThese numbers are so large they become meaningless to our brains.\u201d The site aims to address this problem by demonstrating just what those odds mean in reality. It explains that on average, you\u2019d have to sit and watch it play every second for just over two years to see a EuroJackpot jackpot, and four and a half years to see a Powerball jackpot. And, as the site emphasises, that\u2019s with one draw every second; if you\u2019re buying a weekly ticket, then \u201cyou\u2019d need to play Powerball for roughly 5.6 million years to have a 50% chance of winning once.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other thing that the site demonstrates is how much money these games rake in for their operators. The simulation keeps a running total of wins and losses, and despite the fact that, on face value, the EuroJackpot looks like a much better deal than Powerball, in both cases, the amount of money paid out is about an eighth of the amount received. In other words, for every $100 either operator pays out, they pocket about $800. That\u2019s quite literally money for nothing.<\/p>\n

Hopefully, seeing the absurd numbers that characterize lottery odds set out like this will motivate a few people to stop buying weekly tickets. But humans aren\u2019t purely rational beings. We\u2019re motivated by things like hope, impulse, and despair\u2014and, unfortunately, we\u2019re also really bad at evaluating probabilities. So if you\u2019re going to keep playing Powerball regardless, we\u2019re not going to judge you\u2014but if you do strike it lucky, just be careful on the way home from picking up your winnings. You may well get struck by lightning or hit by a falling piano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The continued existence of lotteries is a demonstration of how little intuition humans have for probability. On some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,141032,106700,213030,64007,11499,105],"class_list":["post-400525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-eurojackpot","tag-lottery","tag-mega-millions","tag-powerball","tag-statistics","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}