The low probability of winning and the risk of splitting the prize in a big, highly covered game mean you'd probably lose money.
That's a pretty big prize. However, taking a closer look at the underlying math of the lottery shows that it's probably a bad idea to buy a ticket.When trying to evaluate the outcome of a risky, probabilistic event like the lottery, one of the first things to look at isExpected value is helpful for assessing gambling outcomes.
Lotteries are a great example of this kind of probabilistic process. In Powerball, for each $2 ticket you buy, you choose five numbers from 1 to 69 from a collection of white balls and one red"powerball" number from 1 to 26. Prizes are based on how many of the player's chosen numbers match those drawn.
Take each prize, subtract the price of our ticket, multiply the net return by the probability of winning, and add all those values to get our expected value.
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