1 in 135,145,920
Those are the odds of winning the mega lottery jackpot tonight. The jackpot is roughly $376,900,000 right now*. I wanted to know how many games of roulette you’d have to win before you’d have the same odds as winning the lottery. My next obvious question: if you won every time would you have more or less money than if you’d won the lottery?
*$376M is the cash return. The payment over time is the more popularly advertised value of $600M
A few assumptions:
1. This is a no limit roulette table
2. You bet all your winnings on the next winning color every time (no green!)
3. Luck is very much your lady tonight
Playing either red or black on a roulette wheel will return a 48.6% win rate.
So 0.486^x = 1/135,145,920 should tell us how many spins!
what’s the result? twenty six spins!
Actually not exactly twenty six spins, that’d be amazingly coincidental.
26 spins is 1/140,429,063
Close enough for MikeDiDonato.com!
Let’s see which option has a better return on investment:
A lottery ticket costs $2.00.
Each roulette win gives you 2:1 odds.
26 wins in a row would return $67,108,864
Sounds like you should head to the convenience store instead of the casino tonight.
But then again… how many more spins would surpass the $376M?
Twenty nine spins (total $536,870,912)- although one more correct call would put you over a billion… it is worth it? Just one more spin? What do ya say?