Dreams, Not Odds, Attract Lotto Fans in Record Numbers

Imagine accomplishing a feat that was so difficult the odds against your success were 1,000 to 1.

And then the next day, you are told to do it again.

What would be your odds of doing it two days in a row? Since 1,000 squared is 1 million, the odds of succeeding would be 1 million to 1.

But staggering as that may seem, that’s a lot better odds than picking the winning numbers for today’s jackpot in the California lottery.

The odds against having a winning ticket are nearly 23 million to 1. And even if you have the right ticket, you almost surely will have to share the jackpot with other winners.

Are you already figuring out how to spend the cash? Figures compiled by the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History indicate that you are more than twice as likely to be killed by falling airplane parts.

Yet despite the staggering odds against winning the biggest jackpot in the history of the California lottery, and possibly the nation, people were buying tickets Tuesday at the rate of between 1 million and 2 million per hour.

“We’re breaking all the records on sales,” said Jana Matal, a representative of the California Lottery Commission in Sacramento. Sales were so brisk that the jackpot is “likely to go over $120 million,” she added.

The national record is $115.5 million.

The jackpot is much bigger than it has been in the past because last June the state made it far more difficult to win. The state hoped to stimulate interest in the lottery by creating super jackpots.

All signs Tuesday pointed toward success in the promotional effort. Despite the fact that a person is 12 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the lottery, people stood in long lines Tuesday to toss their money to the gods.

Until June, players picked six numbers between 1 and 49, and the odds of winning were 1 in 14 million. But state officials looked with envy at the lust created by a $115-million lottery in Pennsylvania in 1989.

Today, players pick six numbers between 1 and 53. The additional four numbers changed the odds dramatically.

“Mathematicians think of it as the number of ways you can choose six things out of 53,” said Donald Ylvisaker, professor of mathematics and director of the statistics division at UCLA.

To be precise, there are 22,957,480 ways to pick six numbers out of 53, said Ylvisaker, a consultant to the state lottery commission.

It doesn’t make any difference which order the numbers follow, as long as all the right numbers are there.

No matter how many people play the game, the odds remain the same because they are based on the fact that there are 53 numbers in the pool, not on the number of people participating in the lottery.

“Your odds for any one ticket will always be 23 million,” Ylvisaker said.

However, the number of players determines the odds that you will be able to keep the pot all to yourself.

Statistically, if 110 million lottery tickets are sold before tonight’s drawing, there probably will be about five winning tickets, Ylvisaker said.

“It’s not likely that anyone will walk away with the whole pot,” he added.

Players can increase their odds by buying more than one ticket because they will have more than one chance of holding the right numbers.

Someone who buys 100 tickets, for example, will increase the overall chance of success by a hundredfold, but since each ticket must buck odds of 1 in 23 million it doesn’t help much.

There are reports of people buying thousands of tickets, but even that would not increase the odds significantly. It would be necessary to buy 22,957,480 tickets to cover all the options, and that assumes that no two tickets are the same.

“Quick Pick” tickets issued by machines, which choose the numbers randomly, would duplicate some tickets.

Many players prefer to pick their own numbers, filling out the forms by hand, and Ylvisaker noted that there is a tendency by these players to pick similar numbers. Multiples of the number 7 are so popular that “if that combination comes in there would be about 12,000 winners,” Ylvisaker said.

The second most popular formula is the tidy 1-2-3-4-5-6, and if that comes up “there would be tons of winners,” he said.

No matter how it turns out, however, nearly everybody who buys a ticket for this mega-lottery will lose.

So why do they do it?

“People think about the possibility of winning, not the possibility of losing,” said Dr. Richard Rosenthal, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who has been working with compulsive gamblers for 12 years.

“For most people, it’s harmless entertainment,” Rosenthal said. “I’m not against it.”

But for some, he added, the lottery is just one more step down a very destructive road.

“They get hooked on the lottery,” Rosenthal said. “They are trying to get back what they lost. They are chasing that dream.”

Most of those who play the game, Rosenthal said, do so for one fundamental reason: They think it would be nice to find an easy road to riches.

“We all have a little bit of that magical belief that wishing will make it so,” he said.

But before you spend the money, consider the odds.

As part of an effort to convince the public that sharks are not as deadly as some movies have indicated, the Museum of Natural History came up with some statistics.

Your chances of getting killed by a shark are 1 in 300 million--so the lottery should be a snap.

Incidentally, your chances of getting audited by the Internal Revenue Service are 1 in 66.

That’s almost a sure thing--at least compared to the California lottery.