Save your money

You didn’t win Wednesday night’s Powerball drawing. I’m almost sure of that. On the other hand, be careful around vending machines. One might kill you.

I say this because it is more likely that you will be killed by a vending machine than pick a winning set of six numbers for a Powerball drawing.

The odds that you will have the right five numbers between 1 and 69 for the first five white balls that pop up, as well as the correct yellow ball with numbers ranging from 1 to 26 for that sixth number is 1 chance in 292,201,388.

Better to spend your $2 elsewhere. But be careful if you put it in a vending machine, because the odds that that machine will fall on you and kill you—about 1 in 112 million—is more than double the chance that you’ll win at Powerball. I know. I know. Somebody’s gotta win, right? Well, wrong. The chance at winning at Powerball is so remote that the $40 million jackpot on the first week of November rolled over 19 times without a winner. And even on Saturday’s drawing, where the nearly $1 billion swollen jackpot created a ticket-buying frenzy in the 44 states that have Powerball, still about one-quarter of the possible winning combinations were not covered by any purchased ticket. These are long, long odds. The odds of being hit by lightning is 1 in 280,000—which means you’re more than a thousand times more likely to be struck by lightning than win at Powerball.

Or how about this from DurangoBill.com, an applied math website: “Imagine lining up baseballs—a standard baseball is about 2.9 inches in diameter—in a row for the 2,998.68 highway miles from Boston to Los Angeles. It would take about 65,515,988 baseballs. Then randomly designate one of these baseballs as a lucky “winner” baseball.

“Imagine driving for days past this row of millions and millions of baseballs. Then stop and pick up a random baseball. The chance of a random ticket winning the new Powerball is less than one fourth the chance of picking the winning baseball.”

And it’s a terrible investment. Because there’s no guarantee anybody will win. And it’s far from $1.5 billion anyway. That’s the value of the payout if taken in installments over 30 years. The lump-sum cash payout drops it by about a third, and doesn’t account for the federal taxes—which are 39.4 percent, plus another 25 percent tax on gambling winnings.

There is, however, a 100 percent chance that the lottery will leave millions of Americans with worthless scraps of paper instead of something with real value they could have purchased with their multiples of $2.

Consider the math, once again from DurangoBill: Spending $2,000 to buy 1,000 Powerball tickets puts your odds at 99.88 percent that you will get back $504 or less, the site calculated.

“As a practical matter, it is unlikely that you will ever buy enough tickets to ever have much of a chance for any of the large prizes,” it says. “Thus it is probable that all you will ever get back from your ticket purchases are piddling small amounts.”

Better to spend that $2 in a vending machine, a sturdy-looking one, and if it’s outside, you might want to first scan the sky for dark clouds.