Lotto is a very bad bet. Don't take my word for it — watch your own money disappear.

Here's a quiet, boring fact that the lottery industry spends billions to keep you from feeling: the expected value of a ticket is about 42 cents on the dollar.

Buy a NZ Powerball line for $1.50 and, on average, it returns about $0.63. Right now. Before you even scratch, before you pick your "lucky" numbers, before you dream about the mansion. The maths has already decided you keep 58% less than you put in — and that's the generous framing, because most of that $0.63 comes back only if you survive the astronomical odds of the jackpot.

The odds, in human terms

The chance of winning the Powerball jackpot is 1 in 38,383,800.

Numbers like that don't fit in a human brain, so let's translate. If you played one line per second, twenty-four hours a day, it would take you about a year and a bit of non-stop drawing to expect a win. If you played like a normal person — one ticket, twice a week — you'd expect to win once every 369,000 years.

You will be dead. You will be dead for roughly 369,000 years before your numbers come up.

And it gets better. That jackpot you're chasing? You don't even get to keep it all, and the more people buy tickets, the higher the chance you share it. But none of that matters, because of the 38 million other things that can happen first.

The house always wins — by design

A lottery isn't gambling the way a casino is. It's gambling with the house edge turned up to eleven. Casinos keep maybe 1–5%. A lotto keeps more than half.

That 58% edge is the entire business model. It's not a bug. It's how they fund the prizes, the advertising, the bright cheerful retailers, and the government's cut — and still come out ahead. Every one of those dollars comes from the gap between what you pay and what the maths says you'll get back.

Stop trusting your gut. Trust a million draws instead.

Your gut says "someone's got to win." And it's right — someone wins almost every week. The problem is the gap between "someone" and "you" is about 38 million to one.

I built a simulation so you don't have to trust me either. It plays the real game — 6 from 40, plus a bonus ball, plus a Powerball — with the real prizes, the real odds, and the real rollover jackpot. Press start and it will buy you a ticket every draw, forever, and show you exactly what happens.

Spoiler: the "Time" figure turns red, and eventually it tells you how many years you'd be dead before your big win lands.

Run the simulation →

The only winning move

If you buy a ticket for the fun of it — the two-dollar daydream — fine. That's entertainment, not investment. But call it what it is.

The moment you think of it as a plan, as "money I'll get back," as something that could solve a problem — stop. Put the $1.50 into literally anything else. An index fund. A coffee you actually drink. A lottery ticket is the only product in the world where the more you understand the maths, the worse it looks.

Go watch your fake money burn in the simulation. It's the cheapest lottery lesson you'll ever buy — because it's free.