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A lottery is a popular form of gambling which involves the drawing of lots for a prize. Some states forbid it, while others endorse it to the extent of organizing a national lottery.
The Lottery is also the name of a famous Shirley Jackson short story which deals with this subject matter.
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Lotteries come in many formats. The prize can be fixed cash or goods. In this format there is risk to the organizer if insufficient tickets are sold. The prize can be a fixed percentage of the receipts. A popular form of this is the "50-50" draw where the organizers promise that the prize will be 50% of the revenue. The prize may be guaranteed to be unique where each ticket sold has a unique number. Many recent lotteries allow purchases to select the numbers on the lottery ticket resulting in the possibility of multiple winners.
Lotteries have been referred to as a "tax on stupidity" by social commentators as the odds of winning are astronomically low. Given the payoff structure, the maximum "revenue to risk ratio" occurs with the purchase of a single ticket; purchasing additional tickets does not proportionally increase the expected value of the total purchase.
One can view the popularity of lotteries more positively as "selling hope". If people care about their relative incomes, lotteries offer the hope of substantially increasing one's social rank. Also, in countries with poorly developed credit markets, lotteries offer consumers the only hope for acquiring major durables (cars, houses, or the like).
In the United States, the existence of lotteries is subject to the laws of each state; there is no national lottery. The first state lottery in the U.S. was established in the state of New Hampshire in 1964; since then, lotteries have sprung up in over half of the states in the US On October 8, 1970, New York held the first million dollar lottery drawing.
The first modern interstate lottery in the U.S. was Tri-State Lotto. Tri-State Lotto was formed in 1985 and linked the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. In 1988, the Multi-State Lottery Association was formed with Oregon, Iowa, Kansas, Rhode Island, West Virginia and the District of Columbia as its charter members; it is best known for its "Powerball" drawing, which is designed to build up very large jackpots. Another interstate lottery, The Big Game (now called Mega Millions), was formed in 1996 by the states of Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan and Virginia as its charter members.
Other interstate lotteries include: Hot Lotto, Lotto South, and Wild Card 2. For more detailed information on U.S. lotteries, see Lottery (U.S.)
With the advent of the internet it became possible for people to play on-line, many times for free (the cost of the ticket being supplemented by merely seeing, say, a pop-up ad). Slight wanings in the overall number of people playing by "traditional" ways (paper ticket, $1 per chance) caused several states to combine into multi-state pools of much larger winning amounts. Some of the many websites which offer free games (, after registration) include www.iwinweekly.com and the larger iwon.com, which is backed by the CBS broadcasting corporation.
See also: Keno
The first known lottery in France was created by the King Francis I in around 1505. After that first attempt, lotteries were forbidden for two centuries.
They reappeared at the end of 17th century, as "public lottery" for the Paris municipality (called Loterie de L'Hotel de Ville) and as "private" ones for religious orders (mostly for nuns in convents).
Lotteries became quickly one of the most important ressources for religious congregations in the 18th century.
Lotteries helped to build or rebuild many churches (about 15 from including the biggest ones) in Paris during the 18th century, including St Sulpice or Le Panthéon.
At the beginning of the century, the King gave the right to do lotteries to religious orders avoiding by this action to give them money, but the amounts generated by lotteries became so important that the second part of the century turned into a struggle between the monarchy and the Church for lotteries control.
In 1774, the Loterie de L'École Militaire was founded by the monarchy (by Mme de Pompadour to be precise, to buy what is called today the Champ de Mars in Paris, and build a Military Academy that Napoleon Bonaparte would later attend) and all other lotteries were forbidden with 3 or 4 minor exceptions.
This lottery became known a few years later as the Loterie Royale de France. Just before the French Revolution (1789) the revenues from La Lotterie Royale de France was about 5 to 7% of total French revenues.
Through the 18th century, philosophers like Voltaire as well as some bishops cited that lotteries exploit the poor. This subject has generated much oral and written debate over the morality of the lottery.
All lotteries (including state lotteries) were frowned upon by idealists of the French Revolution, who viewed them as a method used by the rich for cheating the poor out of their wages.
The Lottery reappeared in France in 1936, called loto, when socialists needed to increase state revenue. Since that time, La Française des Jeux (government owned) has a monopoly on most of the games in France, including the lotteries.
The simple answer is: vanishingly small!
The chances of winning a lottery jackpot are principally determined by 3 factors: the count of possible numbers, the count of numbers drawn, and whether or not order is significant.
In a typical 6/49 lotto, 6 numbers are drawn from a range of 49 and if the 6 numbers on your ticket match the numbers drawn, you are a jackpot winner - this is true no matter the order in which the numbers appear. The odds of this happening by the way are 1 in 14 million (13,983,816 to be exact). So, why are the chances of winning so slim ?
Let's work through an example. If you start with a bag of 49 differently-numbered lottery balls, clearly you have a 1 in 49 chance of predicting the number of the 1st ball out of the bag. Looking at it in a different light, there are 49 different ways of choosing that first number. When you come to draw the 2nd number, there are now only 48 balls left in the bag, so you have a 1 in 48 chance of predicting this number (i.e. there are 48 different ways of choosing that second number).
Thus, each of the 49 ways of choosing the first number has 48 different ways of choosing the second. This means that the odds of correctly predicting 2 numbers drawn from 49 is calculated as: 49 x 48. On drawing the third number you only have 47 ways of choosing the number; but of course you could have gotten to this point in any of 49 x 48 ways, so the chances of correctly predicting 3 numbers drawn from 49 is calculated as: 49 x 48 x 47. And so it goes on until the sixth number has been drawn, giving the final calculation: 49 x 48 x 47 x 46 x 45 x 44. This works out at a really scary number (10,068,347,520) which is clearly a whole lot bigger than the 14 million we were talking about above. So how do we get to that final figure of 1 in 13,983,816 ?
The last step we need to take is to understand that the order of our 6 numbers is not significant. That is, if your ticket says 01 02 03 04 05 06, then you'll be popping the champagne so long as all the numbers 1 through 6 are drawn, no matter what order they come out it. To put it another way, given any set of 6 numbers, there are 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720 ways they could be drawn. Dividing 10,068,347,520 by 720 gives 13,983,816.
To put this number in context, let's say that you're immortal and are going to play 1 ticket with the same numbers every week for ever. 13,983,816 weeks is roughly 269,000 years - in all that time, you've would expect to win the jackpot just once.
Alternatively, imagine a computer randomly drawing 6 lottery numbers every second of every day. Starting it off at 1 second past midnight on January 1st, you would have to wait until 8:23pm on June 11th before it had executed 13,983,816 times. That is, picking the 6 winning numbers is as hard as picking a single second out of more than 5 months !
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