You know those 1 in 5, or 1 in 7 or 1 in 12 odds you will win, cash for some hospital or society lotteries? Have you ever wondered what the odds are that you will win a prize worth winning?

I just received such a flyer, and looked through it. There were 41 prizes worth more than $10,000. The majority of them were worth more than $20,000. I think $10,000 is really the minimum for a reasonably life changing event to occur, like going on a great trip somewhere, buying most of a new vehicle, and other such things.

Many of the prizes in the lottery only cover the initial payment of $100 for the ticket, and that is where the majority of the 1 in 5 odds come from.

So out of nearly 52,000 prizes, only 41 are really worth winning in my opinion.

There are 280,000 tickets available, and so I did the best math I could and came up with a rough figure that the odds of winning one of the 41 real prizes is only 1 in 15,000. My math could be way off here, as I am not statistics major or anything, but it seems like that would be closer to reality.

The next thing that I wondered is if someone could game the lottery? See, the total value of all the prizes is $10,638,889.50. So if someone bought out the lottery (save for any tickets that someone bought before the rich person bought them all out), they would be paying $28 million dollars for $10 million in prizes. That’s a pretty steep, but they have the deal where you can get 3 tickets for $250, saving $50 for every three tickets he buys. So now he is down to only paying $23.3 million for all the tickets.

So let’s say he bought $8 million dollars in tickets, how many would he have, and would it be enough to make a profit? He could get around 96,000 tickets or only around one third the total amount of tickets released. This means that he would probably only get one third the prizes, and thus still lose a fair bit of money.

So rich or poor, there really is no way to game these lotteries. They are looking to make a profit for the hospital, charity or organization, and make around 41 people really happy.

Think I gave this too much thought?