Almost every person at one time cherished the hope of hitting the jackpot in the lottery. Numerous TV spots showing the happy newly minted millionaires make you believe in the reality of Fortune's smile. However, after many attempts, people often lose hope, coming to the conclusion that the lottery is a hoax.
Why are lotteries popular?
The very idea of a lottery, in principle, does not give much reason to doubt honesty. However, we must not forget that the lottery is, in fact, a profitable and stable way of earning money for its organizers. The point is that the prize fund is always less than the income from ticket sales (as a rule, it is no more than a third of the collected amount). Of the remaining funds, a part goes to taxes and necessary costs: printing tickets, organizing draws, advertising, and the rest of the money is the net income of the organizers. Accordingly, it is in their best interest for the lottery to be fair, since the better the reputation of the organizers, the higher the income.
It is necessary to distinguish between lotteries and different games. Lottery organizers have much less opportunity to cheat than those who run draws related to scoring or collecting anything.
Do not forget that the lottery mechanics are designed in such a way that the chances of winning are very small. After all, only a third of the collected funds are raffled off, which means that even if all the winnings were equal to the ticket price, then only every third participant would return their money. And since in reality the size of the most significant winnings can be hundreds of thousands of times higher than the cost of one ticket, it turns out that the likelihood of winning the lottery is slightly more likely to die from a meteorite. For example, in one of the most famous lotteries in the United States of America, the probability of getting a jackpot is one millionth of a percent. Of course, someone wins a lot of money, but there are many more who do not receive anything, so you should not seriously rely on the lottery as a source of income (unless you are its organizer).
It's about probability theory
In addition, do not forget about the law of large numbers, the essence of which is that the probability of any event approaches the real one only with a sufficiently large number of experiments. In practice, this means that you can flip a coin ten times in a row, and it will fall heads up, despite the fact that the probability of one of the sides falling out is 50%. It may take several thousand tosses to get an equal number of heads and tails.
You can increase the chance of winning by cooperating with other people, and, for example, in the United States, it is normal practice to buy tickets by bundling.
As for the honesty of the conduct, there is practically nothing to complain about. Any lottery is the distribution of the prize fund among the participants, selected at random. Another important nuance is the procedure for paying out the winnings, as well as the taxes that are levied on it. Their size depends on the laws of the country where the lottery is held. For example, in Russia, the organizers take on the responsibility to pay tax on winnings, so that the winner receives exactly the amount that was named.
