Lottery math made easy

If I were a math teacher — a statistical impossibility, by the way — I would ask the class today:

“If a lottery game required you to pick all six numbers and the odds of winning are 1 in 9,366,819, how many $2 lottery tickets would you have to buy to make a profit if the jackpot was $2 million or more and the rules say if nobody gets all six numbers, the pool goes to ticketholders who picked four or five numbers?”

While they struggled with the answer, I would read more of the Boston Globe article that details why the lottery in that state is now limiting stores to selling no more than $5,000 worth of the lottery tickets in a single day.

And I’d silently pray that none of the kids asked me how I came up with the answer.