[jmharvey]

Somewhat counterintuitively, the billion-dollar jackpot lotteries' expected values often shrink as the jackpots grow, because the media circus pulls in a lot of players and increase the likelihood of a split jackpot.

It's not that uncommon for a smaller lottery to have a positive expected value. I think the logistics of buying every combination in a pick-6 lottery (on the order of 10 million combinations) would be rather unwieldy, but a pick-5 (on the order of a few hundred thousand combos) could be doable with a small team.

[tzs]

Virginia lottery around the end of 1991: pick 6 from 1 to 44 giving 7 059 052 possible combinations.

The challengers: International Lotto Fund (ILF), an Australian investor group with 2500 investors.

ILF did't quite manage to cover all 7.1 million combinations. They only managed 5 million. They fell short because they underestimated the time it would take to buy the tickets, which they got from around 8 grocery and convenience store chains.

And no, I'm not some kind of lottery history buff. This is one of those weird bits of trivia one picks up in law school. Specifically in the class I took on transnational tax around 1995, where the taxing of ILF's winnings from this hit some edge cases in US and Australian tax law that were interesting and instructive enough for the case to make the next edition of the textbook.

[lupire]

The "broken" lotteries aren't for that kind of jackpot, for the reason you say. The broken lotteries are counting -caeds based: when a fixed priced pool is printed on the cards, and then part of the deck is exposed as losers so the rest of the deck has positive EV.