Most important here is that you can afford $8 a week and you keep yourself in check. There's many many cases of people going WAY overboard, quite often in casinos maxing out all their credit cards, or throwing too much of their limited money at something that doesn't pay off. This is sorta the thing where i don't object when my GF buys some slot games for $20, when it keeps her from playing at the casino with $300 instead.

Certainly i hope to win when i buy tickets, however i'm not going to base my entire life off of the result and kill myself afterwards if i fail.

I wasn't wondering on why I don't win. I actually win every time the lottery draws are made. I get to keep my money.

There was a great episode of 'Sliders' about the lottery. I think that's why I don't play. ;P

I don't know what Powerball is...

Games and wenches.

Buy a majority share of CD Projekt stock then sink the rest in my own tropical island and protect it with a well trained squad of katana wielding ninja.

This is the bit I don't get though... unless it's a different kind of lottery then the ones we have here no one has to win.
If no one picked the right numbers, there would be no winner. It's possible (though not probable I imagine) that a year could go by without a single person winning.. (again, not likely as over here the prize gets bigger the longer it's left un-won and the bigger the prize the more people tempted to play and more chance there is a winning ticket)

Yet people frequently claim that "Someone has to win" is a good reason to play.. in many forms of competition this is the case (like a raffle or draw) but with a lottery it is not..

Don't get me wrong, I occasionally buy a ticket in the hopes of getting lucky, I just fail to understand some people's reasoning for doing so...

I'd likely do the same thing that most lottery winners do - whatever that is - because of human nature and having a sudden, enormous, unexpected influx of money.

Specifically, I would probably start collecting modest 1970s-1990s sports cars, mostly Japanese brands. That has been my automotive weak spot for a long time now, and I would do something about it.

But significantly better than the odds of being attacked by a polar bear and a penguin on the same day. Trainers at Sea World, however, are the exception to those odds. ; )

That's basically what happened here. It's a multi-state lottery, and they worsened the odds of winning (to 1 in 292,000,000) and upped the ticket price to $2 back in Oct. And not surprisingly it went about 2 months with no winner.

However, as the pot climbed over 1 billion $U.S. ticket sales spiked. Estimates for last night's drawing were that about 600 million tickets had been sold, so it became more likely there would be multiple winners than no winners.

And sure enough, it looks like there were 3 winning tickets that will split the 1.58 billion (NPV) prize. If each winner were to take the lump sum rather than the annuity, they'd get about 325 million.



And...while there were many great ideas and suggestions, from Drealmer's desire to help others, to travelling the world and learning about other cultures, to a flotilla of ninjas, the winner is...

tinyE with "giant corn dog."

Thanks for playing, everyone!

You're weird, you know that. :P

Winning ticket was sold less than five miles from here.

So close. So close.

Yeah, I assumed so. We had something similar (though no where near as big) here before Christmas (I think... I don't really pay attention to these things but I remember people talking about it)

That's like me with most platformers. :)

Probably still better odds than being married to ~25 women for one year.

But congrats :)