Bart, with $10,000 we'd be millionaires.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/89689007.html

Why do people hate math? Only someone who is completely ignorant of math, could possibly think that there is any question of the solvency of this program. You pay 1 dollar to have a 1 in 10,000 chance of winning 5,000. The states expected winnings from every dollar gambled is an enormous 50 cents. The fact that so many people on a single day is obviously an anomaly, a statistical blip. The fact that so many people play similar numbers simply means that they take in way more money than expect on every other number drawn, and those money when the heavily played numbers are drawn, in the long term the numbers all balance out. It's like someone suggesting that because i flipped a quarter and got heads 5 times in a row, it brings into question whether or not flipping a quarter is really a 50/50 prospect. No it doesn't, of course it doesn't, only a complete idiot would think that.

As a side note for every dollar gambled playing a game in las vegas, like craps for example, the casinos expected winnings is in the neighborhood of 3 cents. I don't remember the details, i had to work them out as a math problem once, but you have roughly a 48.5 percent chance of winning. So for every dollars you bet, you would get roughly 97 cents (doubling your money 48.5 percent of the time, 48.5X2=97) Similarly for roulette, the odds are made so that you have an even chance of getting your money back except for the green 0 and possibly green 00 (i can't remember if tables have both, or not.) If there's only 1 green 0 than the vegas profit is roughly 1 out of 37, a little less than 3%, and if there's both greens, then the profit soars to almost 5 percent as your chances of winning have fallen to 47.4% (assuming you bet red/black, but similar numbers for any of the other bets.) If las vegas can make the billions they do off 3 cents on the dollar, i think even the government ought to be okay when they make 50 cents on the dollar.