The Lucky Thirteen

As the jackpot for Powerball, the obsession-inducing multistate lottery, climbed past $250 million last week, few could resist the urge to make all those dollars seem less abstract. What could a quarter billion dollars actually get you? TV and radio news spots gave us a hint: the Chicago Bulls! Breakfast, lunch and dinner at McDonald’s for the next 3,500 years! Half as much money as Michael Eisner earned in 1997! We also learned that the odds of winning the grand prize are equal to the odds of getting struck by lightning on 14 occasions in a single year and 40 times higher than the chance of getting killed falling out of bed. How these numbers compare with the odds that Elizabeth Berkely will deliver a performance anyone deems Oscar worthy remains unclear.

With no massive winners since May, when an Illinois couple took home a $195 million jackpot, the purse swelled from an initial $10 million on May 27 to $100 million by July 25 and finally to $295.7 million by last Wednesday’s drawing, making the lottery offering the biggest ever in the world.

In the midst of all the Powerball hoopla, though, no one seemed to come up with any nifty equations for what thousands of Americans might have done instead of spending hours wallowing on endless lines for $1 Powerball tickets, which are sold in 20 states and Washington. As the sum got larger and larger, so too did the crowds making pilgrimages across state lines to buy a piece of the dream. Sometimes skipping work, the hopeful drove from Los Angeles to Bullhead City, Ariz., from Chicago to Kenosha County, Wis., from Brooklyn and Queens to the posh New York City suburb of Greenwich, Conn., where residents (many already in possession of millions of dollars) grew frustrated by the hordes that gathered daily in ticket lines that snaked around whole village blocks. Greenwich police ran up $50,000 in overtime costs.

As a result of last week’s chaos, Powerball officials are looking into ways to streamline game playing. For example, the game’s governing body plans to study the feasibility of adding more sales terminals and faster computers.

But the question remains: Would it have been more productive to watch, say, six straight episodes of Kids Say the Darndest Things than stand in a Powerball queue, typically three hours long? The answer isn’t so simple. Many people view the whole Powerball experience as a good use of their entertainment dollars, and as long as a person doesn’t get fixated on how he or she will one day become more like Ivana Trump, what’s the harm? For the Lucky 13, the decision to play was wise. The dozen and one machinists from Automation Tooling Systems in Westerville, Ohio, have been pooling money for lottery tickets for six years and hit the jackpot last week with the winning numbers 8, 39, 43, 45, 49 and the Powerball 13. With each member having chipped in $10, one Lucky 13er trekked 100 miles over the Indiana line to a Richmond convenience store to buy 130 tickets.

The fortunate bunch, all men, ranging in age from twentysomething to fiftysomething, opted for an upfront lump sum of $161.5 million rather than the jackpot total spread out in payments over 25 years. That entitles each of them to $12.4 million pretax dollars–or the equivalent of a try-harder-next-year Christmas bonus for high-level bankers at Goldman Sachs. All the Lucky 13 remained anonymous, except John Jarrell, a 34-year-old father of three, who told reporters that one of his first purchases will be a Harley-Davidson for his wife that will match his own.

Powerball, the brainchild of physicist Ed Stanek, began in 1992 as a way for relatively less populous states to gain access to large money-generating player bases. The game works this way: to win the jackpot, players must match five numbers, chosen from 1 to 49, and hit the Powerball, chosen from numbers 1 to 42. Matching all but the Powerball yields a $100,000 prize. Matching the Powerball number itself, but no other numbers, wins $3. Players can opt to chose their own numbers or purchase “quick pick” tickets with computer-generated selections. The Lucky 13 always went the latter route. But a former group member named Robert Kronk made the ill-fated decision just three months ago to drop out of the group because he wanted to choose his own numbers. Last week Kronk, an optimist about human nature, told reporters, “I’m sure they’ll take care of me…I’ve helped them out before.”

No matter how many players participate, and, consequently, no matter how big the Powerball pot grows, the odds that any one ticket will hold the precise six-figure combination always remains fixed at 80 million to 1. The odds are determined by the number of possible combinations. The only way to increase your own chance of winning is to purchase more than one ticket.

Ambitious dreamers may wonder: What would happen if one were to spend $80 million procuring all possible combinations–in other words, 80 million different tickets? Well, you could win $295.7 million if no one else picked the winning number. Or you could split it with, say, 10 other winners and lose $50 million. In this imaginary scenario, “you’re guaranteed to win something,” explains Arnold Barnett, a statistician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “but will you recoup your investment? That depends on how many other people win.”

As far as gambling goes, Powerball isn’t the smartest use of one’s money. “We know the arithmetic, and it’s not only a bad bet, it’s actually a very bad bet,” warns Gary Simon, also a statistician, at New York University. “The odds are so high, and [the Powerball administrators] immediately take 50 [cents] of the dollar off the top. If you’re at the horse races, they take about 15[cents] of the dollar before returning the rest of the money to the public. The casinos take something like a nickel or a dime, depending on the game. So lotteries are pretty grim from a statistical point of view. They have massive prizes because they have lots and lots of losers.”

But these truths haven’t seemed to dissuade often desperate, or perhaps just dizzyingly optimistic, Powerball fortune seekers. On July 23, outside Stateline Stationery in Greenwich, owner Bill Summa witnessed a man of about 60, who had been waiting in line at least an hour in 95[degree] heat, keel over onto the sidewalk. An ambulance came, but the man refused to leave the line without buying $15 worth of tickets first. “I took his money, and then, and only then, did he get in the ambulance to go to the hospital,” recounts Summa, who worked 17-hour days in recent weeks, dispensing 80,000 Powerball tickets a day.

Days later, Basil Stewart, an unemployed 25-year-old father of three, drove two hours from Brooklyn to Greenwich to spend $175–mostly crumpled up fives and 10s–on Powerball tickets. Could he afford it? “No comment,” Stewart replied. More disturbing still was the fact that 28-year-old waiter Ernie Kovic, was also on a Greenwich lottery line, funneling all the money he had been saving for college–$3,000–into Powerball tickets.

An obsession with the lottery has even come to acquire an actual psychological label, “lottery fantasy syndrome,” a term coined by Los Angeles therapist Robert Butterworth to explain the depression that occurs when ticket buyers pin all their hopes on winning, and don’t. “It doesn’t matter if you spend a dollar or a thousand dollars. You can be hit with lottery-fantasy syndrome as a result of simply buying a ticket and living your dream before it actually occurs,” says Butterworth. When people don’t win, he explains, “depression and apathy can set in, and life can seem even worse than before you bought the ticket.”

Which, of course, can happen with tickets to bad musical theater too. The way to approach lotteries, experts will tell you, is to spend enough to amuse yourself and never more than your budget allows. If last week was a measure, it’s a lesson many have yet to learn.

–Reported by Andrew Keith/Chicago and Barbara Maddux/Greenwich