My grandpa played lotto for decades. He literally had books and books of numbers thinking he could find a pattern and then win all the time. He never won.
@@smh1245 If You "Look around You", what You will find are a lot of people who believe a lot of things, some of which are VERY strange ! And they often do so for reasons that have NOTHING to do with how the real world works. Unfortunately the human mind is prone to biases and superstition, and not comfortable with uncertainties. And these "predispositions" unfortunately makes up a very fertile ground for beliefs and opinions that can be both totally illogical and not seldom outrageous. But these "beliefs" are for the holder often more "cherished and nurtured" than the "objective and logically consistent knowledge" that they have acquired by experience and education. And in my opinion the only way to change this "natural human behavior" is through more good education. in combination with a "culture that teaches" us to accept that "uncertainty is OK". And that it's good and healthy to harbour an "uncertain but objectively based attitude", which You are willing to update as new facts come to light. And that You should be suspicious of You "certain convictions" as they can "trap" You in Your '"web of biases and prejudices". And if that happens You will be all but totally unable to ever truly understand how "the world works". AND EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY: it will ALSO make You both unable and unwilling to ever "put Yourself in someone else's situation". Effectively making You unable to both empathise with or understand how the world appears to anyone who holds an opinion You don't agree with. And if You wonder how kind of person works, I don't think You will have to look hard to find some very good "figureheads" for this type. Best regards, and my apologies for my extraordinarily long and verbose reply to Your short and very likely rhetorical question.
@@davehart7943 but even that way it was not a lot, also any mathematical calculation can just be broken done into adding or subtracting things. So in that sense more complicated math just is more math
@@davehart7943 yeah but who really cares whatsoever if it's just multiplication and division, that isn't gonna hurt anyone's head. He implied that the math he was gonna do was gonna give people headaches.
@@muhamadirham1494 basically he has the footage of random people doing stuff in his vids for example the maths guy at the beginning, this is known as stock footage. This is normal owned by a website that charges people for the use of the stock footage. And the better quality the more expensive it is.
When you go down to calculating the number of tickets that are expected to have 4 match, you don’t count all 200,000 that you bought. You have to subtract the amount that were 6/6, and 5/6. They don’t get to count again
they arent being double counted. if each ticket has 1% to be 5/6 and 2% to be 4/6 then its only ever going to be a single one of those 2 or neither. lets say u buy 100 tickets, thats an average of 1 5/6 and 2 4/6es
KAKAKAKAKAKAK this is wonderful! PRANK! It is terrible! I looked in the mirror and saw something UNPRETTY: my face. KAKAKAKAKAKA! But I am happy agayn because I have TWO HOT GIRLFRIENDS and I use them to get views on my videos! KAKAKAKAK!!! Good day, dear lokser
I mean, isn't that what "hacking" that has been described in this video is all about? You can't create new rules to always win but you can find loopholes that the actual creator failed to catch to make money
Yeah, either I'm missing something, or their strategy was 'buy lots of tickets on a rollover week, because the lottery pays out 30% more than it takes in on those weeks.'
@@SgvSth this article explains it so much better. Basically all they did was speculate when a rollover occured and buy tickets then because the rollover made the expected value of the returns on a ticket higher than the ticket itself. In order to beat other teams, this MIT team even triggered a rollover earlier than expected with their bulk buying of tickets.
mistakes in the math: 1) counted the 3/6 & 4/6 and ... added them all together which means a 5/6 would also count as a 4/6 and a 3/6. Basically double counting - need to use the "Inclusion-exclusion principle" . 2) in the 2/6 the tickets you would get (from what i understood) would be used in a later prize pool which has a good probability to be lower. which means that their value would decrease. 3) and lastly the amount of time it would take to fill out all those form would be insane!!! if it would take 5 seconds to fill a form, which I doubt, it would take 1,000,000 seconds (5x200,000) which is 277 hours. A average work week is 40 hours therefor it would take almost 7 work weeks to fill out those forms. Average salary in the US is 52,000$ a year which is about 1,000$ a week. so add another 7,000$ dollars to the cost of filling out the forms. sorry for the long comment!
4) You can choose the numbers you pick more carefully to get higher chances of getting 2, 3, 4 or 5 matching numbers. How to do it in the best way is actually an open problem, but I'm sure that you can optimize it a bit. So the actual expected value could be higher
HOLD IT! They’re likely married, so that means that they would likely use both of their gains together, which not only gets rid of the problem you proposed, but also means that one of them can tell the other if something is a bad idea!
Well, sort of. The top prize is always split among winners, and sometimes the runner up works that way. But a lot of them don't. And the lower prizes, like the three and four ball winners get paid from a different pool that doesn't require splitting of such small prizes.
@@brokenglasseso3 this, there's no way this is real. They would need a return of more than 50% before actually getting a profit if accounting for taxes
The odds of that is (kinda number of people playing) in 9.3mil, most people decide to buy balls with birthdays and that stuff son numbers above 30 are used less, so if 100000K people buyd the lottery and you havent chosen obvious numbers the odds of someone getting dame numbers is around 1 in 100 and way smaller for more than one, making the estimated value go down around 0.5%
All the other states not learning from NY and now Florida has more active cases of covid by like 45,000 more active cases than NY had at it's peak... Which was the highest beforehand. Yikes.
@@briandoolittle3422 uhhh, even though its a joke. "Every great mind has a touch of madness" doesnt mean that un-great minds cant have a touch of madness. mAyBE eVerYOne Is CRAZY
Actually the jackpot case is different because if you win the jackpot then the lower prizes will not get the rolldown so the actual expected value is probably a few percent lower than what the video says.
@@martinarbe1 Does it not depend on the actual rules of the specific lottery. Normally indeed prizes are distributed Win Amount ( as a percent of total ticket prices bought ) to Win Tickets in proportion. So say a 10% division across Winning Number/s is divided to those winning tickets, which might be one ticket, 400 tickets , 4000 tickets or whatever. The problem for the operator is offering a FIXED amount of Win Prize per winning ticket.
He, like me, is probably American, and in America we say Math, not Maths, and I have no preference to either because they mean the same thing, but most Americans, when they hear anything to do with the metric system, or the word maths, think of Britain, or England, not, literally all but one other country in the world. (Edit, fixed comma placement)
The insight people really need to take away from this is that once the rollover reached a certain size ALL lottery tickets had an expected value of more than their cost. Buying lots of tickets didn't increase the expected value but it did make making money off it practical.
I'd like to point out that the video fails to inform us that Selbee was not alone in investing his money in the lottery. Firstly, Selbee had already been buying lottery tickets for other lotteries with positive expected values before moving on to Cash Winfall in Michigan. Secondly, he was part of a 32 person betting group, so this wasn't just a story on "how two grandparents broke the lottery". Finally, they weren't the only notable group playing the lottery this way. There was an MIT group of about 50 people who used the strategy, going on to make a business out of it. Some biomedical researchers from Boston University got involved as well. If you liked the story in the video, I'd recommend reading "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg.
thank you for actually explainimg it, this channel is so fruatrating because at the end of the video i have more questions than at the beginning because instead of finishing the video they have to be able to make a snarky transition to their ad read
so *basically* this was just: (Relatable teen memes) + *1. Lottery made it easy to win, lots, very often, and you could check with basic statistics.* 2. *Already-Wealthy* American bought $XX,000,000 of them to amass a fortune. Buy *earplugs.*
Like what? What do you need to know? Filing taxes isn't hard. What we learn is useful for many reasons, one of the more underrated reasons is to improve our learning ability.
To be fair, to make a scheme like this pan out you'd need tons of money beforehand to buy a lot of lottery tickets. The odds only even out once you can buy enough.
@@AirLancer You can be sure that creditors will line up if your business consistently returns 21% every week (or however often that lottery was organized). The bigger question is, how the fuck did he manage to buy all those tickets without the organizers catching up. Or maybe it's just it took them years to change the stupid law (more likely).
Fingering Things ✔️ you’re never going to get verified even if you have thousands of subs, having a fake checkmark to fool people you’re verified? What’s wrong with you
I think I spotted a slight error in your math: you used 200.000 tickets for all calculations, but if you won for example the 3 matching prize, you wouldn’t have a chance to also win the 2 matching prize with that same ticket. So the expected value will be a bit less. -I myself honestly don’t really want to do that correct math but maybe someone else does.- (you would need to calculate how many tickets win the 5 matching prize, and subtract that from the total in the next smaller calculation and that for all the numbers) Maybe this was just an oversimplification for the video, but you could have mentioned it. Anyway, keep up the great work
5 of 6 numbers correct: 1 in 39,028 5.12 * 22,096$ = 110,480$ new tickets: 200,000 - 5.12 = 199,994.88 4 of 6 numbers correct: 1 in 800 250 of 199,994.88 tickets qualify (exactly 249.9936) 250 * 807.52$ = 201,880$ new tickets: 199,994.88 - 250 = 199,744.88 3 of 6 numbers correct: 1 in 47.4 4,214 of 199,744.88 qualify 4,214 * 26.85$ = 113,145.9$ actual return 425,505.9$ return in video: 425,640$ video profit is 0.0003% more than correct i'm using "," for thousand and "." for decimal (US way, although i'm not from there) don't know if my calculations are correct, did them fast, errors could occur
I've thought about similar schemes with the lotteries in my area, and I'm pretty confident it wouldn't work. My understanding is that these lotteries don't award the full prize to every winning ticket; they split the prize between each winning ticket. So if I win the jackpot but so do two other people, then I only win a third of the jackpot. Might be fine though, because I don't know if it also works that way for lower division prizes.
Americans, as a rule, have far too much "your not the boss of me" along with the need to learn everything the hard way built into their identities. Lol
It is important to mention that the overall expected return of the lottery was significantly less than one. The important part that he glances over is the two million figure he briefly mentions. The "winfall" only happened when that week the total prize rose above two million. So it was only profitable on the weeks where the winfall condition would take effect. Otherwise you would just be feeding the pool. There were groups that would put enough money in to unexpectedly bring the total prize pool over two million by buying hundreds of thousands of tickets, in order to get a larger share of the two million that was built up over previous weeks. The video makes it sound like the state was losing money, which was not the case at all. When mega millions rises high enough it is the same thing, where your expected value increases over time when there aren't any winners to the point where it may become above 1. Is it really a loop hole to buy more tickets when the prizes are higher?
4:55 I noticed a math error. You are still determining the Ev based on 200,000. A ticket that won on 5 numbers can't win on 4 or less. And a ticket that won 4 can't win 3 or less. You'd have to subtract the expected number of tickets at each step before the next step. The incorrect way you did this makes it *just* above the EV, so I don't think it works if you did it correctly.
Hold up their only crime was buying lots of tickets. That means anyone playing would have the same odds. So they did nothing special they just bought tickets.
@@rpe That is the worst insult in the history of mankind, I here by arrest you for violating the 31st human right that I totally didn’t just make up, the Discord Mod right, where all human beings have the right to no be called a discord mod with the exception of people named John.
“You know what isn’t a mistake getting a pair of raycon earbuds” yes it is a mistake they are horrible for anybody who’s used either the base or “high quality” pair
@@RoninMike-DR audio technica.. you clearly have no idea what good sound is.. i use tin cans connected by a rope and let me tell you.. this has the best sound quality in the industry. so much so in fact that i replaces my ears with tincans and a rope! never heard better sound in my life!. Next week .. Why my organs are better replaced by balls of tinfoil!
In case anyone is confused, expected value is essentially just a fancy way to say ‘average value’ or ‘mean’. Expected value is the sum of multiplying each outcome by their respective probabilities (the likelihood the outcome will occur) instead of the sum of all terms (x) divided by the number of terms (n), probability is essentially number of favorable outcomes for an event divided by the total number of outcomes. Tldr, expected value just uses a rearranged formula to get the mean, expected value is just used for random variables (such as lottery winnings), while we typically use mean for samples.
gov is cool about that, they collect taxes from the winner. federal tax + state tax :) for example california is nice and doesnt collect state tax on winnings, but unfortunately Massachusetts does :p
I learned this one on my own If you start a business it can teach you how to scale profit, analyse and understand complex physical phenomena math can teach you how to minimize costs, the most important benefit of math is that it teaches you how to think logically and in an abstract way
So the lottery was basically always doomed to lose money and they just realized that buying much would lose the lottery much? Damn, that was some advanced math right there, glad it was pretty math
I remember watching this on 60 minutes back in January. They had a federal fraud agent coming after them because he thought they were cheating only to find out they were in fact playing the game fairly and there was nothing he could do. They also had storage lockers full of every single lottery ticket over the years in case they had to do some proving.
Back in the early 90s, the Connecticut lottery was $14 million. Probably the highest it's ever been. I had 5 of the 6 numbers. Thinking 5 numbers had to be good for at least a 6 digit payout, I was pretty upset when I learned that they have a set amount that gets shared with other winners who had 5 numbers. Want to know how many other people had 5 numbers? 180! Never before, and never since, have that many people had 5 numbers on one drawing. I check the payouts and you never see more than 7 winners having 5 numbers. And I'm sure there are more people playing these days, than in the 90s.
Maybe it's because people who play the lottery tend to pick some numbers more than others, and maybe there were 6 common numbers rolled, which led to an abnormal amount of people getting 5 numbers.
That he doesn't even do correctly. He forgot to subtract the 5 number winners from the number of tickets for the 4 number winners, because you ant win both on the same ticket.
There are several stories of people winning lottos by buying them out or otherwise playing the odds like this. When interviewed, one of them said the actual drawing wasn't that interesting. The stressful part was trying to actually buy that many tickets.
Video: Get top-quality, comfortable , and surprisingly affordable earbuds Description: Get top-quality, affordable, and surprisingly comfortable earbuds Which one is it HAI?
I never comment on RUclips, but I had to say this. First time finding your channel; I’m liking the humor and quirky commentary, but when you made that Avatar: TLA reference I knew I was dealing with a man of the highest class and culture. I literally had to stop the video, Like and Subscribe, before continuing.
at like 3:23 so lupus, according to google thats like your boddy attacking itself, and youd get it because you hated urself so much for watchning it your body just decided to attack itself for doing it?
ditto and ditto. Infographics Show is so annoying. The way they pedantically explain every obvious thing to increase video length (and thus revenue) has caused me to never watch a single video of their again, despite some topics that look really interesting.
Somehow , RUclips landed me on a 3 hour ad after this video. This ad turned out to be the 2020 AWS re:invent conference and to my own surprise , I enjoyed listening to the whole thing. We live in strange times were the worst of situations can bring up such unexpected innovations.
@@JubilantJerry The web is a strange place. I try to be as relevant and concise as possible when I make my searches. Once or twice a month I get pleasantly surprised by suggestions on RUclips. This add was one of those moments.
Maybe I missed a point. But one ticket = one prize (i.e. if you match 4 numbers, then you can't get the lower or higher value prize with said ticket). How can they be added together as shown?
Started doing this meditation at my wits end. I was suffering mentally emotionally and financially. Didn’t have a job. Started August 2019 and it’s now April 2020 I have had a job since November & got another job
Sounds like one of those clickbait/malware articles you find at the bottom of shady or sell-out websites, next to “You won’t believe what these child stars look like now” and “10 times celebrities went too far”.
"Every nation gets the government it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre (This is especially true in - socalled - democracies as y'all voted for the president. And don't give me this "but he lost the popular vote" BS - you knew your system was ducked for about 300 years now, it wasn't a question *if* but rather *when* a tyrannical autocrat would take advantage of it, but changing it was butchering the holy cow, so you didn't...)
@Aurora Peace - ...he really was NEVER ELECTED BY THE US PEOPLE, as Trump and his cronies "played the system" to win via The Electoral College (Trump LOST by 3.5 Mln votes and George W. Bush also LOST by 550K votes and "won" the same way).
My uncle played the lottery three times in his life as far as I’m aware. He won every time. The first one the jackpot was large at the time (this was around the year 1990) and the clerk convinced him to buy an easy pick. He did, and he ended up winning around $5 million as easy picks were apparently not very random so he had to split the jackpot with some others. The second and third were for much smaller amounts. He sent me a ticket on my bday once and it hit for around $500 if I remember correctly. It was like 3 of the numbers that matched. The other one he hit more numbers and won somewhere in the tens of thousands.
He was generous with his winnings. He instantly retired from Ford and moved from Michigan to Tampa, FL. Bought a fairly modest house on a golf course and still had a decent sum left when he passed.
My grandpa played lotto for decades. He literally had books and books of numbers thinking he could find a pattern and then win all the time.
He never won.
I only won a lottery once. I lost the ticket. It wasn't that much tho, 40 euros.
Scientific observation.
My mom once won 5UAH, approximately 1USD at that time xD
That's not how luck works
@@smh1245 If You "Look around You", what You will find are a lot of people who believe a lot of things, some of which are VERY strange ! And they often do so for reasons that have NOTHING to do with how the real world works.
Unfortunately the human mind is prone to biases and superstition, and not comfortable with uncertainties. And these "predispositions" unfortunately makes up a very fertile ground for beliefs and opinions that can be both totally illogical and not seldom outrageous. But these "beliefs" are for the holder often more "cherished and nurtured" than the "objective and logically consistent knowledge" that they have acquired by experience and education.
And in my opinion the only way to change this "natural human behavior" is through more good education. in combination with a "culture that teaches" us to accept that "uncertainty is OK". And that it's good and healthy to harbour an "uncertain but objectively based attitude", which You are willing to update as new facts come to light. And that You should be suspicious of You "certain convictions" as they can "trap" You in Your '"web of biases and prejudices". And if that happens You will be all but totally unable to ever truly understand how "the world works".
AND EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY: it will ALSO make You both unable and unwilling to ever "put Yourself in someone else's situation". Effectively making You unable to both empathise with or understand how the world appears to anyone who holds an opinion You don't agree with.
And if You wonder how kind of person works, I don't think You will have to look hard to find some very good "figureheads" for this type.
Best regards, and my apologies for my extraordinarily long and verbose reply to Your short and very likely rhetorical question.
"Insane amount of math"
Does only multiplication and division
@@davehart7943 but even that way it was not a lot, also any mathematical calculation can just be broken done into adding or subtracting things. So in that sense more complicated math just is more math
@@RoeiCohen that is some hogh level not picking right there
@@davehart7943 yeah but who really cares whatsoever if it's just multiplication and division, that isn't gonna hurt anyone's head. He implied that the math he was gonna do was gonna give people headaches.
@@RoeiCohen Damn u tried nitpicking yet ended up saying bs
@@RoeiCohen eeh no way
"Lots of math"
*basic arithmetic*
"The ACTUAL numbers"
"To make the math pretty,..."
As a mathematician, I admit actual numbers scares me, let alone numbers that big
I'd be more comfortable working in variables
@@aloysiuskurnia7643 there is no way you are a mathematician 😂
The actual numbers was the lottery jackpot/winnings. The pretty numbers were how many tickets were purchased in the example.
Big numbers are annoying
Big number of big numbers- big annoyance
Jokes asides yes, harder math is around variables
@@wattleproductions8026 I'm doing a mathematics degree and I hate numbers, its not what you think it is.
The "H" in his logo actually has been standing for "Hot Dog Tuxedo Boy" this whole time
Bruh
Bruh
Bruh
Bruh
Bruh
This guy is getting lots of sponsorships, I can tell because his stock footage is getting much more high quality.
Don't get it please explain
Muhamad Irham he uses so many stock videos which costs money
@@muhamadirham1494 basically he has the footage of random people doing stuff in his vids for example the maths guy at the beginning, this is known as stock footage. This is normal owned by a website that charges people for the use of the stock footage. And the better quality the more expensive it is.
@@ce3jay196 now I get it thank you very much
@@muhamadirham1494 all good 👍
When you go down to calculating the number of tickets that are expected to have 4 match, you don’t count all 200,000 that you bought. You have to subtract the amount that were 6/6, and 5/6. They don’t get to count again
That was exactly my thought.
they arent being double counted. if each ticket has 1% to be 5/6 and 2% to be 4/6 then its only ever going to be a single one of those 2 or neither. lets say u buy 100 tickets, thats an average of 1 5/6 and 2 4/6es
Also what I was thinking
Side effects: Lupus?
Nah, it can't be. It's never lupus.
Well, the expected value of it being lupus ain't zero.
It's never lupus, except for the one time that it was. But only that one time.
KAKAKAKAKAKAK this is wonderful! PRANK! It is terrible! I looked in the mirror and saw something UNPRETTY: my face. KAKAKAKAKAKA! But I am happy agayn because I have TWO HOT GIRLFRIENDS and I use them to get views on my videos! KAKAKAKAK!!! Good day, dear lokser
funny thing, in malay, Lupus mean dispose
AxxL the lokser is you
This guy was obsessed with planes, trains, and now, he's with the lottery.
What about gains?
What about hotdogs
And bricks.
bricks
@@aquarocket8165 uh he gets them anyway
It seems that the lottery was already broken when they came, they just took the money
I mean, isn't that what "hacking" that has been described in this video is all about? You can't create new rules to always win but you can find loopholes that the actual creator failed to catch to make money
Yeah, either I'm missing something, or their strategy was 'buy lots of tickets on a rollover week, because the lottery pays out 30% more than it takes in on those weeks.'
@@SgvSth this article explains it so much better. Basically all they did was speculate when a rollover occured and buy tickets then because the rollover made the expected value of the returns on a ticket higher than the ticket itself. In order to beat other teams, this MIT team even triggered a rollover earlier than expected with their bulk buying of tickets.
@@grahamthompson5581 this
@@somethingelse9228 these aren't even loopholes
It's just called: playing the game
So you two gramps are cons?
- "Yep"
What do you do?
- "Rob lotteries"
Where are your guns?
- *whips out calculator* "Right here"
@@milehighstadium06
I agree
Take my like to go higher in the comments
Haha legal robbing goes brrrrr
mistakes in the math:
1) counted the 3/6 & 4/6 and ... added them all together which means a 5/6 would also count as a 4/6 and a 3/6. Basically double counting - need to use the "Inclusion-exclusion principle" .
2) in the 2/6 the tickets you would get (from what i understood) would be used in a later prize pool which has a good probability to be lower. which means that their value would decrease.
3) and lastly the amount of time it would take to fill out all those form would be insane!!! if it would take 5 seconds to fill a form, which I doubt, it would take 1,000,000 seconds (5x200,000) which is 277 hours. A average work week is 40 hours therefor it would take almost 7 work weeks to fill out those forms. Average salary in the US is 52,000$ a year which is about 1,000$ a week. so add another 7,000$ dollars to the cost of filling out the forms.
sorry for the long comment!
True
They are grandparents. Most likely have all the free time they need.
We have now computer programs which can fill millions in seconds
4) You can choose the numbers you pick more carefully to get higher chances of getting 2, 3, 4 or 5 matching numbers. How to do it in the best way is actually an open problem, but I'm sure that you can optimize it a bit. So the actual expected value could be higher
@@flowerwithamachinegun2692 You sir obviously know nothing about statistics
Hold on there, Jasper. You're forgetting the fact that if multiple people win with the same numbers, they share the prizes, which reduces your take.
HOLD IT!
They’re likely married, so that means that they would likely use both of their gains together, which not only gets rid of the problem you proposed, but also means that one of them can tell the other if something is a bad idea!
Well, sort of. The top prize is always split among winners, and sometimes the runner up works that way. But a lot of them don't. And the lower prizes, like the three and four ball winners get paid from a different pool that doesn't require splitting of such small prizes.
Also....taxes
@@brokenglasseso3 this, there's no way this is real. They would need a return of more than 50% before actually getting a profit if accounting for taxes
The odds of that is (kinda number of people playing) in 9.3mil, most people decide to buy balls with birthdays and that stuff son numbers above 30 are used less, so if 100000K people buyd the lottery and you havent chosen obvious numbers the odds of someone getting dame numbers is around 1 in 100 and way smaller for more than one, making the estimated value go down around 0.5%
"American states have a god-given right to repeat the mistakes of other American states" sure has been our motto these last few months, hasn't it?
The entire video has been a build-up just so he could make that statement at the end.
Months?
All the other states not learning from NY and now Florida has more active cases of covid by like 45,000 more active cases than NY had at it's peak... Which was the highest beforehand. Yikes.
That was cringe bro
@@Freak80MC But California is ahead of both and doesn't get mentioned... It is very annoying when it turns from being about facts to being political.
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle
Arse-total
I guess that qualifies me as a great mind!
Name one genius that ain’t crazy - Kanye
@@briandoolittle3422 uhhh, even though its a joke.
"Every great mind has a touch of madness" doesnt mean that un-great minds cant have a touch of madness.
mAyBE eVerYOne Is CRAZY
Arrrrrrrghhhhhh
You are also here¿
The grandpa buying thousands of lottery tickets sounds like the dude from the math books.
Actually the jackpot case is different because if you win the jackpot then the lower prizes will not get the rolldown so the actual expected value is probably a few percent lower than what the video says.
Very true, economist here
Interesting
That would be the case all the way down if I understand it correctly.
But the jackpot is 2 million dollars so whether or not you get the rolldown you still make bank 2:48
@@martinarbe1 Does it not depend on the actual rules of the specific lottery. Normally indeed prizes are distributed Win Amount ( as a percent of total ticket prices bought ) to Win Tickets in proportion. So say a 10% division across Winning Number/s is divided to those winning tickets, which might be one ticket, 400 tickets , 4000 tickets or whatever. The problem for the operator is offering a FIXED amount of Win Prize per winning ticket.
The Grandparents to their Grandchildren:
*Do your maths and you can break the lottery just like us*
found the brit
@@sakinano99 I am not british
He, like me, is probably American, and in America we say Math, not Maths, and I have no preference to either because they mean the same thing, but most Americans, when they hear anything to do with the metric system, or the word maths, think of Britain, or England, not, literally all but one other country in the world. (Edit, fixed comma placement)
@@Franktanker0 I'm from Singapore
@@vrind2705
opponents demolished
Oof size: large
The insight people really need to take away from this is that once the rollover reached a certain size ALL lottery tickets had an expected value of more than their cost. Buying lots of tickets didn't increase the expected value but it did make making money off it practical.
I'd like to point out that the video fails to inform us that Selbee was not alone in investing his money in the lottery. Firstly, Selbee had already been buying lottery tickets for other lotteries with positive expected values before moving on to Cash Winfall in Michigan. Secondly, he was part of a 32 person betting group, so this wasn't just a story on "how two grandparents broke the lottery". Finally, they weren't the only notable group playing the lottery this way. There was an MIT group of about 50 people who used the strategy, going on to make a business out of it. Some biomedical researchers from Boston University got involved as well.
If you liked the story in the video, I'd recommend reading "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg.
thank you for actually explainimg it, this channel is so fruatrating because at the end of the video i have more questions than at the beginning because instead of finishing the video they have to be able to make a snarky transition to their ad read
Selbee himself also has a graduate degree in math
I like the fantasy better, plus it's just as believable. This is all High School level math and statistics here.
Jerry and Marge go large
His videos are turning into more of him self-deprecating himself than the actual topic
I’m concerned cause his videos weren’t this way. Quarantine getting to his mental state?
it's probably bc his Wendover Productions videos are always serious
There's a movie coming out in less than a month based on this story starring with Bryan Cranston called Jerry & Marge Go Large
There is 1 thing I learned from the video:
Sam likes stealing hot dogs
so *basically* this was just:
(Relatable teen memes) +
*1. Lottery made it easy to win, lots, very often, and you could check with basic statistics.*
2. *Already-Wealthy* American bought $XX,000,000 of them to amass a fortune. Buy *earplugs.*
@@ruegables5322 Or in other words: bad.
So the couple didn't break the lottery, the lottery broke the lottery.
eyy my first name sounds like yours but mine starts with B
@ nah its Basel lol not Basil and no I aint.
I dont get the video
More like they made the lottery go broke ...
That's what I was thinking. Wouldn't any state using this lottery system lose money every time the pot got big enough?
I wish school taught us how to file taxes and have a mandatory class for actual life skills
I had a financial literacy class in high school. I went to a weird school, but still, they exist.
Like what? What do you need to know? Filing taxes isn't hard. What we learn is useful for many reasons, one of the more underrated reasons is to improve our learning ability.
Bruh taxes are simple percentage elementary school maths if you only had paid some attention rather than thinking miscellaneous
Learn it yourself. Better than school
Bro grow up. Most kids whine about this. Most of y'all would probably be on your phones in class. 🙄
Says "$484,463.5", but has $484,206 on the screen. Meanwhile in my brain: "Cannot compute, malfunction, malfunction!"
Smol brain
Dum dum
Big brain time
People seem to be ignoring the fact that they actually DID THIS for years and came out 26 million ahead
To be fair, to make a scheme like this pan out you'd need tons of money beforehand to buy a lot of lottery tickets. The odds only even out once you can buy enough.
@@AirLancer You can be sure that creditors will line up if your business consistently returns 21% every week (or however often that lottery was organized). The bigger question is, how the fuck did he manage to buy all those tickets without the organizers catching up. Or maybe it's just it took them years to change the stupid law (more likely).
@@clray123 There was many friends and family involved....
and they were already business owners too.
@@Lyrandar Not just any business ... They owned a convenience store. May've used the biz to mask their purchases.
Alternate timeline where Walter White was a mathematician.
Lottery: Exists
Mathematicians: It’s free real estate
Fingering Things ✔️ you watch hai I thought you where stupid
@@robertgc2889 Judging from the fact that you cannot spell, i think you might be the stupid one...
hold the up
Fingering Things ✔️ you’re never going to get verified even if you have thousands of subs, having a fake checkmark to fool people you’re verified? What’s wrong with you
fake checkmark? bro, we're not stupid. there would be a gray backround and a white checkmark on your name. we are not that dumb.
“Sire! The people are revolting!”
Oh my, what do they want?
“They want Bricks my lord... Bricks!”
NEVER!
T H I S N E E D S M O R E L I K E S
so @Half as Interesting sees it
Get this comment to the top
Ermm... You could have said 0.5% of the population.
Half of 1 is 0.5, or one... One half.
Correct me if I'm wrong...
*I dare you.*
Iniesta 8 Lol, love that xd
I was not expecting that Elon and grimes joke but it SENT ME
I think I spotted a slight error in your math: you used 200.000 tickets for all calculations, but if you won for example the 3 matching prize, you wouldn’t have a chance to also win the 2 matching prize with that same ticket. So the expected value will be a bit less.
-I myself honestly don’t really want to do that correct math but maybe someone else does.- (you would need to calculate how many tickets win the 5 matching prize, and subtract that from the total in the next smaller calculation and that for all the numbers)
Maybe this was just an oversimplification for the video, but you could have mentioned it. Anyway, keep up the great work
I noticed the same thing, unless he already did the subtraction without stating so?
@@PoprocksAndCoke777 I'm guessing this is the case. He probably just wanted to simplify it.
@@VioletEnds Why? Give us the math!
@@emmanuelwestra6524 you want lupus that badly?
5 of 6 numbers correct: 1 in 39,028
5.12 * 22,096$ = 110,480$
new tickets: 200,000 - 5.12 = 199,994.88
4 of 6 numbers correct: 1 in 800
250 of 199,994.88 tickets qualify (exactly 249.9936)
250 * 807.52$ = 201,880$
new tickets: 199,994.88 - 250 = 199,744.88
3 of 6 numbers correct: 1 in 47.4
4,214 of 199,744.88 qualify
4,214 * 26.85$ = 113,145.9$
actual return 425,505.9$
return in video: 425,640$
video profit is 0.0003% more than correct
i'm using "," for thousand and "." for decimal (US way, although i'm not from there)
don't know if my calculations are correct, did them fast, errors could occur
I've thought about similar schemes with the lotteries in my area, and I'm pretty confident it wouldn't work.
My understanding is that these lotteries don't award the full prize to every winning ticket; they split the prize between each winning ticket.
So if I win the jackpot but so do two other people, then I only win a third of the jackpot.
Might be fine though, because I don't know if it also works that way for lower division prizes.
Breaking up the jackpot only happens with the very top prize
@@megarockman to add to that it gets lesser and lesser likely for more and more peopole to win the highest jackpot.
*EXPONENTIALLY* lower odds.
We're talking about a 1 in (Jackpot odds to the power of however many people won the jackpot)
@@kithraya7081 no. Your odds will always be the same based on how many tickets you have
I remember reading about this quite some time ago. This was an excellent, easy to understand explanation, well done!
"American states have a god-given right to repeat the mistakes of other American states."
Sir I had not heard or read better statement or description about US.
Americans, as a rule, have far too much "your not the boss of me" along with the need to learn everything the hard way built into their identities. Lol
But is he wrong?
@@lucasw7647 ask the relatives of the coronavirus victims.
mikosoft lol do the answer is no he’s not wrong
Half as Interesting: like when the Fire Nation attacked...
Me: *ah, a cultured man.*
tangeriine ah I see ur a man of culture* (is this better?)
but baa sing se still peaceful after fire nation attack
Good show, over used meme
@Gentcheeto at 2:59
Wtf when I read this comment the part of the video formation played
It is important to mention that the overall expected return of the lottery was significantly less than one. The important part that he glances over is the two million figure he briefly mentions. The "winfall" only happened when that week the total prize rose above two million. So it was only profitable on the weeks where the winfall condition would take effect. Otherwise you would just be feeding the pool. There were groups that would put enough money in to unexpectedly bring the total prize pool over two million by buying hundreds of thousands of tickets, in order to get a larger share of the two million that was built up over previous weeks. The video makes it sound like the state was losing money, which was not the case at all. When mega millions rises high enough it is the same thing, where your expected value increases over time when there aren't any winners to the point where it may become above 1. Is it really a loop hole to buy more tickets when the prizes are higher?
NO WAY!!! YOU'RE HOT DOG TUXEDO BOY!!?? Dude we have to reconnect!
The only loophole I know is in youtube that makes it possible for Half as Interesting to be popular with such bad jokes.
Good try bro
@@aech7150 he still has more likes than you
@@4ltrz555 ya no i just finished the video this wasnt his best work lmao
4:55 I noticed a math error. You are still determining the Ev based on 200,000. A ticket that won on 5 numbers can't win on 4 or less. And a ticket that won 4 can't win 3 or less. You'd have to subtract the expected number of tickets at each step before the next step.
The incorrect way you did this makes it *just* above the EV, so I don't think it works if you did it correctly.
Yeah, i didn’t notice that so thanks for pointing that out
What was here?
He only gets away with it, if we let him.
@@puellanivis he wont
No it totally isn't his childhood memory
It was a hypothetical scenario
We still love him
And this was very supicoisly spesefic.
Haha let’s point and laugh at hot dog tuxedo boy 😂
HAI is peter griffin
Jahahahahah
At least he's the *hot* dog tuxedo boy, not merely the dog tuxedo boy.
Hold up their only crime was buying lots of tickets. That means anyone playing would have the same odds. So they did nothing special they just bought tickets.
That’s half as interesting
who tf said that it was a crime? you look like a discord mod in your pfp
@@rpe That is the worst insult in the history of mankind, I here by arrest you for violating the 31st human right that I totally didn’t just make up, the Discord Mod right, where all human beings have the right to no be called a discord mod with the exception of people named John.
@@sevensouls009 xDD
@@rpe I wouldn't want to be tending to the lotto register seeing them walk in. That's for sure.
“You know what isn’t a mistake getting a pair of raycon earbuds” yes it is a mistake they are horrible for anybody who’s used either the base or “high quality” pair
50 more dollars for Airpods
@@davitisahakyan48 airpods are junk no even moisture proof, also it's too much money for 20hz-20khz, Audio Technica is were it's at.
@@RoninMike-DR audio technica.. you clearly have no idea what good sound is.. i use tin cans connected by a rope and let me tell you.. this has the best sound quality in the industry. so much so in fact that i replaces my ears with tincans and a rope! never heard better sound in my life!. Next week .. Why my organs are better replaced by balls of tinfoil!
Me, who's using a hat he bought off Amazon with cheap Bluetooth speakers in the brim: 😕
Galaxy Buds ftw
In case anyone is confused, expected value is essentially just a fancy way to say ‘average value’ or ‘mean’. Expected value is the sum of multiplying each outcome by their respective probabilities (the likelihood the outcome will occur) instead of the sum of all terms (x) divided by the number of terms (n), probability is essentially number of favorable outcomes for an event divided by the total number of outcomes. Tldr, expected value just uses a rearranged formula to get the mean, expected value is just used for random variables (such as lottery winnings), while we typically use mean for samples.
"If not, then this video will make as much sense as the relationship between Elon Musk and Grimes" 😂😂😂😂 the jokes are on point!
I started watching this...then I got the notification for it.
I am *SPEED*
People: Break the lottery
Gouvernment: wait you weren't supposed to do that
gov is cool about that, they collect taxes from the winner. federal tax + state tax :)
for example california is nice and doesnt collect state tax on winnings, but unfortunately Massachusetts does :p
New startup idea : investors i need seed funding 😂 business model : buying tickets
Me: How would math help me in the future?
Teacher:
I learned this one on my own If you start a business it can teach you how to scale profit, analyse and understand complex physical phenomena math can teach you how to minimize costs, the most important benefit of math is that it teaches you how to think logically and in an abstract way
6:14 Yeah it is a mistake raycons are pretty horrible Its the reason why there so damm cheap there not high quality.
So the lottery was basically always doomed to lose money and they just realized that buying much would lose the lottery much? Damn, that was some advanced math right there, glad it was pretty math
It’s never Lupus
Shoutout to all the House fans
but it was. at least twice.
@@CocoaPimper shhhhh
I remember watching this on 60 minutes back in January. They had a federal fraud agent coming after them because he thought they were cheating only to find out they were in fact playing the game fairly and there was nothing he could do. They also had storage lockers full of every single lottery ticket over the years in case they had to do some proving.
Back in the early 90s, the Connecticut lottery was $14 million. Probably the highest it's ever been. I had 5 of the 6 numbers. Thinking 5 numbers had to be good for at least a 6 digit payout, I was pretty upset when I learned that they have a set amount that gets shared with other winners who had 5 numbers. Want to know how many other people had 5 numbers? 180! Never before, and never since, have that many people had 5 numbers on one drawing. I check the payouts and you never see more than 7 winners having 5 numbers. And I'm sure there are more people playing these days, than in the 90s.
Maybe it's because people who play the lottery tend to pick some numbers more than others, and maybe there were 6 common numbers rolled, which led to an abnormal amount of people getting 5 numbers.
Cool but you should at least tell us how much you got in the end
@@dudu28r81 Not that it is anyone's business, but less than $3,000.
“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
― Alan Turing
What the hell does that quote have to do with this video m8
Is that really his quote? That would've been very insightful of AI.
@@JeskaiEye maybe the Lottery machine has something to do with this
“Hopefully, you followed that.” *wasn’t listening at all, keeps watching*
Commentator: "this video was made possible because of raycon"
Me thinking: "nah this video was made possible because of 2 grandparents " lol
As an Arizonan, I will viciously defend my state’s right to repeat other states’ mistakes
editor: How much stock footage do you want?
Half as Interesting:
y e s
Economics Explained: Am I a joke to you?
Did you use the numbers without replacement or could the 5/6 odds tickets also win the 4/6 and 3/6 odds winnings?
0:23 GLIZZY GOBBLER
"And just like the fire nation attacked, the jackpot rolldown changed everything"
Nice.
"Bonkers amount of math, srsly this math so hard hur dur"
> 8th grade math barely qualifying as "statistics".
actually you need a phd to understand :)
That he doesn't even do correctly. He forgot to subtract the 5 number winners from the number of tickets for the 4 number winners, because you ant win both on the same ticket.
0:18
You asked people to prom?
You went to prom?
Woa. Must've been nice
Imagine trying to find a stock video for “hot dog tuxedo boy”
5:10
Sweet, using both commas and periods for decimals, I see.
How is nobody talking about that reference to Avatar: The Last Airbender?? He's a man of culture
Man of culture is he
Literally everyone is -_-
Even people who haven't seen the show know that reference, its been around for a decade
It’s one of the most popular kids’ anime. Not quite as big as Pokémon but about the same level as Yugioh and digimon
You're so nice, my teacher didn't warn me about math...
There are several stories of people winning lottos by buying them out or otherwise playing the odds like this. When interviewed, one of them said the actual drawing wasn't that interesting. The stressful part was trying to actually buy that many tickets.
I might break the lottery if I had a time-traveller
Or if you can see future winning numbers
Jack White you can’t ask for specific numbers on a ticket
@@crispyrainbow Yes, yes you can.
Great technique to get folks to watch the entire vid. You prep’d us for an insane amount of math then showed a regular amount. Nice!
Video: Get top-quality, comfortable , and surprisingly affordable earbuds
Description: Get top-quality, affordable, and surprisingly comfortable earbuds
Which one is it HAI?
Both but only one or the other flows well
I don't have any Raycons myself, but from what I've heard, they're top-quality, affordable, comfortable and, surprisingly, earbuds.
None of the above. I tried them they’re trash
I never comment on RUclips, but I had to say this. First time finding your channel; I’m liking the humor and quirky commentary, but when you made that Avatar: TLA reference I knew I was dealing with a man of the highest class and culture. I literally had to stop the video, Like and Subscribe, before continuing.
"
U STILL NEED A LOT OF LUCK TO PULL THIS OFF SUCCESSFULLY"
> Insane amount of math
> Literally just puts the numbers on the screen without working through any of the calculations
Literally? Simply?
The calculations are there. They are just insanely simple to begin with
"The rest of high school" after prom is, like, twenty minutes.
at like 3:23 so lupus, according to google thats like your boddy attacking itself, and youd get it because you hated urself so much for watchning it your body just decided to attack itself for doing it?
"At least this video can't give me lupus" was the only reason I decided to watch it. 😩
Imagine going to prom 😏
-Or having the courage to ask someone to prom-
Grandparents: "1 + 1 = 6"
Lottery: *shut up and take my money*
I'm waiting to see a comment of the students HAI went with to school and see if they remember hot dog tuxedo boy
I thought this was The Infographics Show . . . HAI thumbnails have sure evolved a lot over the past month!
I prefer the older ones myself
ditto and ditto. Infographics Show is so annoying. The way they pedantically explain every obvious thing to increase video length (and thus revenue) has caused me to never watch a single video of their again, despite some topics that look really interesting.
@@castillelarkin Sometimes their info is just plain wrong too
Somehow , RUclips landed me on a 3 hour ad after this video.
This ad turned out to be the 2020 AWS re:invent conference and to my own surprise , I enjoyed listening to the whole thing. We live in strange times were the worst of situations can bring up such unexpected innovations.
Oh wow, I work for AWS and I didn't even know there were youtube ads for re:Invent
@@JubilantJerry The web is a strange place. I try to be as relevant and concise as possible when I make my searches. Once or twice a month I get pleasantly surprised by suggestions on RUclips. This add was one of those moments.
5:18 You said "$484,463.5" but put "$484,206" on the screen.
But how did he even get the fifty cents? At 5:16 he shows "$29,412 x 2 = $58,823.5". I think he is trying to cheat us out of fifty cents!
Next episode of HAI:
"Why life in jail is not bad"
XD
It'll be interesting to see how many things from this video get into the Mistake Corrections Episode 3.
May be multiple multiple things.
@@shootingskelly17 Not from me. That is the extent of my math skills.
@@WanderingYankee
So go learn Yourself!
I wanna see episode about jail!
XD
Actual mathematician watching the video... Started laughing as soon as they said "jackpot roll-down" This kind of thing never gets old
As an actuary it had me rolling the entire video 😂
The woman at 1:50 is stock footage from story blocks, just go to there website search "equation" scroll down a bit and you will find it.
0:02 I swear this is the 69th time in 3 days that I saw a youtuber sponsored by Raycon
That's actually really cool. I think I understand fairly what they did. Pretty damn smart.
Maybe I missed a point. But one ticket = one prize (i.e. if you match 4 numbers, then you can't get the lower or higher value prize with said ticket). How can they be added together as shown?
3:20 "it's never lupus"
This video half way in: "Here's an insane amount of math." Wooosch! ...End of the video.
Me: "Wat."
Started doing this meditation at my wits end. I was suffering mentally emotionally and financially. Didn’t have a job. Started August 2019 and it’s now April 2020 I have had a job since November & got another job
This is more like a commentary video rather than an infotainment video
Oh shoot I'm early gotta make a joke-
HAI is an educational channel.
HAHA
Sounds like one of those clickbait/malware articles you find at the bottom of shady or sell-out websites, next to “You won’t believe what these child stars look like now” and “10 times celebrities went too far”.
"Just ask Texas, Florida, and Arizona"
*HOW COULD YOU SAY SOMETHING SO CONTROVERSIAL YET SO TRUE*
EDIT: wtf this comment blew up
Non American here, can you please explain what does it mean?
@Aurora Peace Just generally accepted as one.
@Aurora Peace Voting Trump is 100% a mistake.
"Every nation gets the government it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre
(This is especially true in - socalled - democracies as y'all voted for the president. And don't give me this "but he lost the popular vote" BS - you knew your system was ducked for about 300 years now, it wasn't a question *if* but rather *when* a tyrannical autocrat would take advantage of it, but changing it was butchering the holy cow, so you didn't...)
@Aurora Peace - ...he really was NEVER ELECTED BY THE US PEOPLE, as Trump and his cronies "played the system" to win via The Electoral College (Trump LOST by 3.5 Mln votes and George W. Bush also LOST by 550K votes and "won" the same way).
Here I am wondering if the “Lupus” was a reference to House.
It's always lupus
@@ChaoticLifemaker It's never lupus
"it's never Lupus" G. House
@@pfisherking except for that one time when it was.
3:40 how does the 1 in 39,028 come about?
Fact: 1+1 = 11. Everyone knows that.
#include
#include
using namespace std;
int main() {
string str;
str = '1' + '1';
cout
@Anant Tiwari Nah man, doubles are the way to go.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutterBboolean because of there being 0 and 1.
It is in base 1.
My uncle played the lottery three times in his life as far as I’m aware. He won every time.
The first one the jackpot was large at the time (this was around the year 1990) and the clerk convinced him to buy an easy pick. He did, and he ended up winning around $5 million as easy picks were apparently not very random so he had to split the jackpot with some others.
The second and third were for much smaller amounts. He sent me a ticket on my bday once and it hit for around $500 if I remember correctly. It was like 3 of the numbers that matched. The other one he hit more numbers and won somewhere in the tens of thousands.
Damn, uncle cutting you out short with that ticket he knew exactly what'd happen lmao but holy shit your uncle is something
He was generous with his winnings. He instantly retired from Ford and moved from Michigan to Tampa, FL. Bought a fairly modest house on a golf course and still had a decent sum left when he passed.