Just a little digression tonight, the Megamillions jackpot is up to $252 million tonight and I thought it’d be fun to do a little quick analysis of your chances of winning. For those that don’t know, the game is played by choosing five numbers from a set of 1 to 56 (without reptition) and then a “megaball” number between 1 and 46.
So, for those that know a little about probability, there are (56C5)*46=175,711,536 different permutations of numbers that you can choose. Rather than go through all the probabilities of winning, the lottery actually publishes its own listing of probabilities to help you out. Check it out below:

So, knowing these probabilities, let’s calculate expected values. Expected values are calculated simply by multiplying the expected result by the probability of it happening. Here’s how we would
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