Do you always buy tickets, or only when the jackpot is huge?
One of the most odd beliefs is that you should never buy lottery tickets when a progressive lottery jackpot is below $50 million dollars. Well why not? Who would balk at winning $10 million dollars? It’s not like the chances of winning a jackpot are better the higher the amount gets, right? Or is there some truth to this belief?
Not worth getting out of bed for less than $50m?
The belief that it is not worth playing a lottery for under $50 million dollars has no real origin. It just seems to be an arbitrary number someone picked to justify the expenditure of money on gambling. But unfortunately, that belief is shared by many players.
On the other side of the coin, there are people who buy several tickets just to win a $1 million dollar jackpot. They don’t care how big the jackpot could reach, they know that winning $100 million dollars would be the best, but know that even $1 million dollars will pay off their debt and get them a new house and car and interest to live on.
So why do some people refuse to buy a lottery ticket unless the jackpot is over a certain amount? Well, human greed comes to mind. For some, why settle for a little when you can go for a lot? “One million dollars? That wouldn’t even pay off my loans. Why waste my money on a ticket? I’d need fifty million just to pay off my debts and move to a proper neighbourhood and get the type of house and car that I really want.”
So they feel that purchasing a ticket for a small jackpot is a total waste of time and money and the only time to buy a ticket is when it is only worthwhile to so, and that is when the jackpot reaches a certain threshold.
Another reason people wait to buy a ticket only when the lottery jackpot is super high is the belief that the jackpot can only be won when the amount is super high in order to get a lot of tickets sold and then the jackpot is allowed to be won to feed the lottery high jackpot frenzy so as to make as much money as possible.
The trouble with both the threshold and allowed theories is that the operator has no influence over the jackpot amount nor when the jackpot will hit. Just because a lottery jackpot is high doesn’t mean that it is “due” or “allowed” to be won. The jackpot only gets higher when nobody wins it. When it is not won, ticket purchases go towards increased the jackpot. The operator does not make or influence how high the jackpot can get before it is won. Everything to do with a lottery jackpot amount or lottery odds is one hundred percent random.
And when the jackpot is high more tickets get sold which means more potential winning number combinations are generated and more duplicate tickets with the same numbers on them get printed. So actually waiting for the jackpot to reach a certain amount is actually not a good thing to do. Simply buying a ticket for every draw, even when the jackpot is lower, is much better than buying a ticket only when the jackpot is high. Fewer ticket purchases on lower jackpots means less of a chance of someone picking numbers that match the ones that will be drawn. So it is better to have a chance at a lower jackpot prize than having no chance at all.
Don’t wait for the lottery jackpot to reach monumental proportions before you buy your tickets. A lottery jackpot win of any amount is a good thing as that is the purpose of playing the lottery in the first place. Don’t ignore free tickets and five dollar or one million dollar prizes by waiting months for the jackpot to rise. Buy your tickets when the jackpot is at any amount, as any amount of a win is beating the odds and winning the jackpot no matter what the amount the jackpot is.