Someone Spent $25 Million on Lottery Tickets to Guarantee a Win. And It Worked.

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They won $96ish million, took the lump payout of $57 million.
- That’s a really affordable military.
  
  lol I thought I edited it before anyone saw that.
- How the fuck can you win 96 million on a lottery and only receive 57 mil?
  Is that a Freedom©®™ thing the rest of us wouldn't understand? 😂
  
  Taxes.
  ...Which the rest of the world understands well. So why don't you?
  
  You have a choice: get 57M or get an annuity that costs 57M and pays out 96M over two decades
  If you took the 57 million and invested it in an index fund you would probably do better than 96M over the same timespan, though you would probably be taxed more and have to be responsible enough to not spend the money instead
  
  The lottery has 2 possible payout methods. One is over time, something like 21 years, IIRC, that will net you the 96 million. There is also the lump payout option that will net you smaller amount overall but more all at once.
- Wonder what they're gonna do with their $23 million.
  
  Hookers and blow
Great, even the lottery is P2W
stefan mandel won a bunch of jackpots in australia and the us during the 1970s and 80s doing the same thing, buying all the numbers.
My coworkers and I had a fun lunch calculating minimum purchase amounts to guarantee or significantly increase winning chances for some smaller local lotteries. There’s a surprising amount of chances to do this especially if you pool your money and don’t have to wait for receipts to be printed. There was one local lottery for ~11m and would only require ~600k to be most likely to win based on the average ticket sales of that specific one.
Everyone realizes the risk is that if someone else wins you get half the pot and if three people do you get 1/3rd and so forth. Large lotteries tend to have large sales and are more likely to have split winnings.
Didn’t Voltaire do this?

30 comments