Hey DGX: Play The Worst Game In The World Without Losing All Your Money

[RBP]

Powerball is horrible. Nobody should ever play Powerball. Your chances of making money are astronomically low and yet millions of people play every week. For these players, the allure of the big money prize is too much for logic to overcome. Logic needs some help. Perhaps this simulator can be of service.

Justwebware.com brings us the U.S. Powerball Simulator (http://justwebware.com/powerball/powerball.html)(there are also versions for the UK National Lottery (http://justwebware.com/uklotto/uklotto.html) and EuroMillions (http://justwebware.com/eurolotto/eurolotto.html)), the purpose of which is to show just how impossible it is to make money playing Powerball.

Powerball has drawings twice a week so the simulator lets you play twice a week at either the $2 Quick Pick level or the $3 Power Play level. It then uses a random number generator to play out the results.

I gave the simulator a go, choosing Quick Play and keeping it on the “fast” setting. A half hour and about 200 years of “game time” later, I still hadn’t hit any prize over $100, so I kicked the speed up to “max,” which plays out at about a year per second. The standard “Return on $” investment hovers around $0.07 and $0.08 when you don’t hit anything over $100, which I didn’t until … okay, I was really hoping I would have hit by the time I got to finishing this paragraph. I went back to the opening paragraphs, I cropped some pictures, put in the hyperlinks and now I’m stalling …

I just hit the 500 game-years mark.

I guess I’ll go make a sandwich.

I just watched the Gangnam Style video four times in a row.

1000 years. I’m now down about $192,000.

Good thing I didn’t promise to have this in on a deadline.

That Gangnam Style dance is harder than it looks.

I really need to get back in shape.

This has been going on for an hour — 1,750 game-years. The odds of hitting the $1 million prize are 1 in 5,153,633. I’ve played about 180,000 games.

I’m giving this until 2pm, then I give up and finish this post regardless.