Fox News advice on how to win the lottery

Honestly, it’s a better strategy than this one:

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That’s a suckers plan. Everyone knows when you profit you REINVEST in your business model.

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Just be sure no one else also wins, you wouldn’t want to split it with them. :slightly_smiling:

Here’s the thing. You cannot win if you do not play. Buying one ticket increases your odds of winning from ZERO to >ZERO. Thus spending one dollar on a ticket increases your chances infinitely. However buying an additional ticket does very very little to improve your odds, and relative to the benefit of purchasing the first ticket, is simply a wasted dollar.

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I’m not surprised that Fox News gave shitty advice about playing the lottery. I was very disappointed that ABC News gave shitty advice about playing the lottery:

Their tips include:

  • Illinois produces the most winners, so move to Illinois.
  • Most winners let the machine pick their numbers, so do that to improve your chances.

Apparently, it’s all faux.

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Please fucking tell me that’s not real.

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It is equally true that you cannot lose if you do not play.

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Actually, that’s the one strategy that can actually improve the odds. Some numbers are simply more popular than others - numbers that look like dates, for example, or phone numbers. Those numbers will be picked more often than others, and therefore their payout is more likely to be shared. A purely random selection is therefore slightly less likely to share the payout, which improves the expected value of winnings.

But I still don’t believe in gambling.

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I always found Kentucky’s lottery motto to be pretty skeezy in this regard: “Somebody’s gonna win, might as well be you.”

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Exactly. Your odds of winning is almost zero. Buying any less than 100 million tickets won’t have any effect on that.

I play, because why the fuck not? It’s $2 a week for a lot of daydream material. But I know enough to understand that buying 50 tickets instead of one isn’t going to make the odds measurably better.

Mike’s rules of gambling:

  1. Play for fun, not to win.
  2. Never spend more gambling than you would on a movie, bar tab, or whatever else for which you would receive nothing more than a couple hours amusement.
  3. If you ever feel like you’re actually going to win next time, STOP. You’re not playing for fun anymore.
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Buying ticket after ticket, and never winning, is fun?

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Prediction: This will be won by a non-US Citizen.

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Dreaming about what I’d do if I won is more than $2 worth of fun for me. Knowing there’s that infinitesimal speck of a possibility I could win is what makes it fun. I’m not deluded enough to think it will actually happen.

Alternately, I could go rent Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot from Redbox. Let’s face it- the lottery is a better way to spend that money.

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That’s where you set the bar? It’s more fun than Ninja Turtles?

I’m sure you could quit any time you wanted, honest.

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They say that planning the holiday is half the fun. So why not save money this year and stay at home and plan two?

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I actually had a great hour or two of conversation with my pal Pedro the Cruel the other day, triggered by his purchase of a lottery ticket. Well worth the $2! I hope he wins.

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Definitely more fun than watching a bunch of guys running around and jumping on each other- And about 200 times cheaper. Personally, I think it’s completely insane that people spend money on lousy burnt coffee at Starbucks or watch WWE on pay-per-view.

But hey- whatever makes you happy.

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You reach a point where the odds that you win are similar to the odds of a billionaire taking a sudden liking to you and gifting you a few million.

The second scenario costs nothing, so that’s the one I go with.

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Off the top of my head, I am not even sure where or how you buy a lottery ticket.

Also, a Deep Thought:

It’s easy to sit there and say you’d like to have more money. And I
guess that’s what I like about it. It’s easy. Just sitting there,
rocking back and forth, wanting that money.

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if you pay attention to the advice of the advertizing fox news sells around here the answer is to buy silver plated replicas of classic gold coins.

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