Carbondale Reporter

The Southern Illinoisan recently issued the following announcement.

You won't catch Barry Nelson buying a lottery ticket, no matter how big that jackpot gets.

Nelson is a data scientist who specializes in probability and statistics at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. And from his mathematical vantage point, that shot is just way too long.

Nelson cites the "expected value" -- a formula that factors in the jackpot amount and the probability of winning it -- to determine it's simply not worth the money.

"If you played over and over and over again, you'd still lose," he said. "It's just like in Las Vegas. The house has the advantage."

But it's not just ticket-seekers throwing reason to the wind who have gotten us to where we are now: a historic jackpot of $1.6 billion on the line Tuesday night.

Last year, the Mega Millions lottery made three changes in the game that improved the odds of matching five numbers for a $1 million payout but lessened the chance of matching all six numbers to release the minimum $40 million prize. The longer chances also made the jackpot roll over more often.

That huge jackpot up for grabs Tuesday has turned over 26 times since July, lottery officials say.

The sticker shock of such prizes -- Tuesday's jackpot will be followed by a Wednesday night Powerball drawing for an estimated $620 million -- can fuel intoxicating fantasies.

Those fantasies may have played on Kit Yarrow's mind when she stopped by a 7-Eleven on Saturday and bought a Mega Millions ticket. Then again, maybe it was the chance to join the excitement. Maybe both.

"People who really have no interest, they still want to be part of it," Yarrow, an author and emerita psychology professor at Golden Gate University in San Francisco who specializes in consumer behavior, said Monday. "It's sharing a cultural experience in a way."

So many issues these days seem to trigger outrage and argument, Yarrow said. Buying a lottery ticket can allow people to establish a common bond, she said. People tend to enjoy pondering how they would spend the money.

"People are a little bit crazy," Yarrow said. "Mostly, it's really pretty harmless."

The problems start, she added, when people who can least afford lottery tickets buy more when the astronomical jackpots emerge.

"Anybody who can't afford to lose it shouldn't buy a ticket," she said.

In Mega Millions, players personally select or allow lottery gaming machines to randomly pick six numbers. A player who matches the first five numbers selected wins $1 million.

If the sixth number -- the Mega Ball -- also matches, that player wins the Mega Millions jackpot, which on Tuesday will total an estimated $1.6 billion.

The three changes Mega Millions made in October 2017 included narrowing the range of numbers from which players select, Illinois Lottery spokesman Jason Schaumburg said.

Players choose five numbers from 1 to 70 -- instead of the previous 1 to 75. That change improves a player's chances of hitting those numbers correctly, Schaumburg said.

Original source can be found here.