How to play a lottery?

I just loved this comment left on the freakonomics blog by another reader that I decided to post it here:-

“Do our economists play the lottery themselves, or do they consider it a tax on people who are bad at math?”

I found a way to play the lottery with positive expected winnings.

Every week I pick a bunch of numbers, and don’t buy any tickets. Every time my numbers don’t come up, I declare myself the winner of the $2 I didn’t spend on each ticket.

It’s an amazingly lucrative way to play.

Hypothetically it’s possible I could lose millions of dollars one day under this method. But I don’t lose sleep over it for the same reason I don’t lose sleep over the possibility of a meteor hitting my car.

- on 29 Jun 2007 at 9:23 pm # Mango