THE BIGGEST BET

POWERBALL AND OTHER LOTTERIES OFFER THE BIGGEST PAYOUTS IN GAMBLING, AND SOME PROFESSIONALS HAVE FOUND WAYS TO GAME THE SYSTEM

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Since 1964, the lottery has been the biggest and most prominent form of legal gambling in the United States. And it is impossible to miss. Winners of Powerball, Lotto, Mega Millions and other lotteries typically go public as a condition of getting paid. They celebrate with oversized checks, express caviar dreams and become multimillionaires overnight.

The payouts can be the very stuff of dreams. On 11 occasions, the grand prize has exceeded $1 billion. On November 7, 2022, Edwin Castro of Altadena, California won the largest lottery jackpot in American history, $2.04 billion. (His lump-sum payout was $997 million.) He treated his friends to a Fiji vacation, and invested in some pricey California real estate, including a $47 million mansion in Bel Air.

But the payouts are incredible longshots. Powerball has odds of roughly one in 292 million, Mega Millions one in 302.6 million. The only consistent winners are the 48 U.S. jurisdictions doing the selling, to the tune of some $100 billion annual ticket sales, paying out only around $64 billion. Percentage wise, that’s a paltry 64 percent. Consider that slot machines in Las Vegas routinely cough up more than 90 percent of the dollars wagered. Even the most sucker-attracting games in the casino are better for players. One of the worst bets you can make at the craps table, wagering on any seven, for example, pays off some 83 percent of the time.

“Nearly all state lottery offerings have house edges so high that those games would be illegal in local casinos,” says one professional gambler who’s figured out how to game certain iterations of the lottery. Not surprisingly, he won’t say how he did it or have his name attached to such exploits.

At its core, the lottery is no damned good. At least, for most of us. Clearly, however, Joan R. Ginther is not like most of us.