For some people, often those with the least amount of money to spare, playing the lottery can be a serious drain on their finances. It's true. According to statistics an overwhelming amount of lottery participants are in the lower economic classes. That's why economics experts claim that the lottery is a tax on the poor.
Lotteries don't involve skill; they are determined purely by chance. So what are your odds of winning? The short answer is, "Not so good."
For example, in a lottery in which you pick 6 numbers out of 49 numbers, your chances of winning the jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816, that's almost one in 14 million. If you bought one lottery ticket every week you could expect to win once every 269,000 years.
Of course not all lotteries have odds that good. The Mega Millions multi-state lottery has odds of approximately 1 in almost 176 million!
There are some things that offer better odds than winning the lottery. According to figures from the National Weather Service, you're over 20,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to win the Mega Millions. And, you have a one in 59,507 chance of dying from a hornet, wasp, or bee sting.
The odds of winning the lottery do not increase by playing frequently; it's better to buy more tickets for the same drawing, but not by much.
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