Neat Trick

this was what i needed to know as well but i think there was a cut off to the grand prize. once that was surpassed than any & all winners got a bigger payout. for example if you matched 2 numbers you'd get triple what you normally would win.

I have no idea - I imagine each lottery has different rules. I did look at a UK lottery that rolled down recently and even though it was a fair amount of cash most seemed to end up in a very large number of the smallest prizes.

The tickets cost about $2 each. The multimillion dollar jackpot required the winner to pick six winning numbers. The odds of doing so were so prohibitive that the game usually had no jackpot winner.

However, Jerry saw from the Winfall brochure that you had a 1-in-54 chance to pick three out of the six numbers in a drawing (which paid such lesser-tier winner just $5) and a 1-in-1,500 chance to pick four numbers (which paid such lesser-tier winner only $100). What he realized was the roll-down gimmick in this Winfall game increased the winning payouts on these lesser-tier winners who enjoyed much higher odds of winning.

The roll-down meant that if nobody won the jackpot for several drawings, it would be rolled-down so that on the next drawing, as long as there was no six-number winner (a highly probable scenario) the jackpot cash flowed to the lesser tier winners in the form of increased payouts. In the roll-down drawing, each winning three-number combination would pay out $50 instead of $5, and the four-number winners would pay out $1,000 instead of $100.

This meant that a player who waited until the roll-down stood to win much more than he lost by buying enough tickets (considering the odds) to ensure so many winning three- and four-number tickets that the winnings would overcome the costs of buying all the tickets (including losers).

The math showed that if he purchased x thousands of tickets during the roll-down drawing, Jerry was guaranteed to win 40-50% more than he spent buying tickets so long as there was no jackpot winner. And even in the unlikely chance of a jackpot winner, Jerry would ultimately beat the system in future drawings by continuing to play using his formula. Thus, he was guaranteed to make up his losses stemming from the rare chance someone won the jackpot because there would never be enough jackpot winners to result in losses to Jerry that would overcome all the guaranteed winning from the more frequent roll-down drawings.