Why I would never buy a lottery ticket

If you have ever considered buying a lottery ticket, consider this… 

Everyone knows that the probability of winning the lottery is a pretty big long shot. How long, however, you probably never really thought about. Your actual odds of winning the lottery depend on where you play, but single state lotteries usually have odds of about 18 million to 1 while multiple state lotteries have odds as high as 120 million to 1.

If you have ever thought you might have a chance of winning the lottery, you’re not alone. About one out of every three people in the United States think that winning the lottery is the only way to become financially secure in their life and think that if they play they might win. This is a frightening statistic when you sit down and consider what the above odds really mean.

How about the classic odds of being struck by lightning? The actual probability of this happening varies from year to year, but as a good estimate, the National Safety Council says between 70 and 120 people a year die in the US by lightning – so let’s take 100 as our base. With the US population being approximately 300 million people, that means that the chances of being killed by lightning are roughly 1 in 3 million. Not very likely. However you are still 6 to 45 times more likely to die from a lightning strike than you would be to win the lottery.

What are the chances that if you’re playing with a group of four that two of you will get a hole-in-one on the exact same hole? At 1 in 17 million, they’re better than the chances of you winning the lottery.

You are 450,000 to 3,000,000 times more likely to die in an asteroid collision in the year 2029 than to win the lottery- see http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_update_041227.html.

If none of the above has convinced you to stop playing the lottery, then I’ll bring out my favorite lottery fact. If you drive 10 miles to purchase your lottery ticket, it’s three to twenty times more likely for you to be killed in a car accident along the way than to win the jackpot.

Source: http://cheftonio.blogspot.com/2009/02/chances-of-winning-lottery.html