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September 2, 2025<\/p>\n
3 min read<\/p>\n
Should You Spend $2 to Win $1.3 Billion? Inside Powerball Math<\/p>\n
Winning more than $1 billion in Powerball is an exciting possibility, but keeping a cool math mind can help you decide whether that opportunity is worth your $2 bet<\/p>\n
By Mark Fischetti edited by Dean Visser<\/span><\/p>\n No one has won the Powerball lottery jackpot in many weeks, which means the next drawing (slated for Wednesday) is worth an estimated 1.3 billion\u2014one of the largest payouts in U.S. history. The question, of course, is whether a $2 bet on something like this is \u201cworth it.\u201d Here\u2019s the math.<\/p>\n For Powerball, you pick five random numbers out of the digits 1 through 69, plus a \u201cPowerball number\u201d from 1 to 26. This math is simple: With a single ticket, your chance of winning is one in 292,201,338. If you buy two tickets and run different numbers, your odds are two in 292,201,338\u2014not much better!\u2014and so on. You may think, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m going all out this time. I\u2019m spending $50 to buy 25 tickets.\u201d Your chance is now 25 out of 292 million, which is still, sorry to say, infinitesimal.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n What about the idea that you should play different numbers week to week? People like to use their birthday or the date of an anniversary or other special numbers. Go for it. A set of any six numbers for Powerball has exactly the same chance of winning\u2014or, well, most likely losing\u2014this week as that same set of numbers has next week. Each draw is a new day and has nothing to do with prior draws. Perhaps the most famous case of this happened in reverse: In 2009 the Bulgarian national lottery randomly selected the winning numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42. Four days later, when the next drawing was held, the same six numbers came up.<\/p>\n You can try to guarantee a win if you can find a whole lot of people and coordinate your buying. But the math here is daunting. Consider the \u201cguaranteed win\u201d that happened in the Virginia Lottery in 1992, which we covered years ago: Players had to pick six numbers out of 44, so there was a one-in-seven-million chance of winning. To play every possible combination, which would guarantee a win, someone would have to buy seven million tickets, which, at $1 per ticket, would cost $7 million. The jackpot had grown to $27 million, so 2,500 people formed a consortium. Each person paid about $3,000 in an attempt to cover all the possible combinations. The group scrambled to buy tickets and tried to make sure each purchase was a different set of numbers. These individuals ran out of time and \u201conly\u201d purchased five million different tickets. But that was enough. They won! For Powerball, though, the winning chance is not one in seven million\u2014it\u2019s one in 292 million, and tickets are $2 each. So within a couple of days, you\u2019d need enough friends to physically go buy 292 million tickets and to somehow know that each set of six numbers you picked was unique. And you\u2019d have to spend almost $600 million. Good luck with that.<\/p>\n The one counter to these remote possibilities is the \u201cworth it\u201d factor. As the jackpot goes up, is spending $2 more \u201cworth it\u201d? In 2023 our resident mathematical whiz Jack Murtagh, who writes our Math column, offered a cool mathematical assessment of this emotion-based question in one of his articles. He wrote that the \u201cExpected value of a bet = (Probability of winning) \u00d7 (Winning amount) \u2013 (Probability of losing) \u00d7 (Losing amount).\u201d If you roll a six-faced die and bet $1 on one number for a $1 payout, the expected value is \u2013$0.667. Translation: the bet is not worth it. But if the payout is $100 for a $1 bet, then the expected value is about $16, well worth a shot. For Powerball, with a $2 bet and a $20 million payout, the expected value is \u2013$1.93\u2014really bad! As Murtagh wrote, \u201cYou\u2019d get more value out of those two bucks if you traded them for a dime.\u201d But if the payout is $1 billion\u2014hmm. Do the math and see. (Okay, okay! My back-of-the-envelope calculation says the value is around $1.42.) Of course, this expected payout is a philosophical exercise. It doesn\u2019t raise your chances of one in 292 million.<\/p>\n But maybe that doesn\u2019t matter. Sure, you can hope against hope to win the big one. In the meantime, you\u2019re spending $2 to live out a fantasy that might last at least a day or two. To quote Murtagh: \u201cWe all make frivolous purchases, and most of them have zero probability of netting us a fortune.\u201d The excitement of playing the game, of the remote but grand possibility of winning big, he added, \u201cmakes people happy regardless of the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American<\/span> has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American<\/span> subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm <\/span>always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" September 2, 2025 3 min read Should You Spend $2 to Win $1.3 Billion? Inside Powerball Math Winning more than $1 billion in Powerball is an exciting possibility, but keeping a cool math mind can help you decide whether that opportunity is worth your $2 bet By Mark Fischetti edited by Dean Visser No one<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[1810,11499,102,11498,11497,4714],"class_list":{"0":"post-18802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-bet","9":"tag-billionbut","10":"tag-hits","11":"tag-jackpot","12":"tag-powerball","13":"tag-worth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Chance of Winning<\/h2>\n
On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
Playing Different Numbers<\/h2>\n
Massive Ticket Buy<\/h2>\n
High Payout, Greater Worth<\/h2>\n
Fun Factor<\/h2>\n
It\u2019s Time to Stand Up for Science<\/h2>\n