So, the less you play, it's even dumber to play the next time.
I never play, so I must be a genius.
Yes. The lotto is dumb. It is a very very poor negative-EV bet.
You can make an argument that when it gets to a large enough jackpot, it approaches or could even be positive-EV. I.e. powerball odds of winning are 1 in 292,201,338. Given that it's a $2 bet, that means that once the jackpot is above $584,402,676, the napkin math would say it's a positive bet if you're a sole jackpot winner.
However, that's not really true. Because you only get that much money if you spread it over 30 years, which doesn't grow with inflation, so your real winnings are smaller than your nominal todays-dollars winnings. Or you can take the lump sum, which is probably somewhere around half that. Which means the jackpot needs to be double that if you take the lump sum to be a positive EV bet, so maybe you need a jackpot to be somewhere north of $1.2B to be positive-EV. And then it's still risking a split jackpot--which gets higher when more people play, which happens when jackpots get that large.
So playing the lottery is objectively a bad bet.
So why do I occasionally do it? Because I can afford to, and for a couple of hours up to a couple of days, I "might" be rich. And that's fun. It would be a problem if the money spent truly impacted my ability to do other more important things in my life. But by doing it so rarely, and with a small amount of money, it's basically just noise.
