{"id":22,"date":"2003-02-18T15:22:07","date_gmt":"2003-02-18T21:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/?p=22"},"modified":"2003-02-18T15:22:07","modified_gmt":"2003-02-18T21:22:07","slug":"whos-the-bigger-sucker-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/2003\/02\/whos-the-bigger-sucker-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Who&#8217;s the bigger sucker, a"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/powerball.com\/\">Who&#8217;s the bigger sucker, a lottery player or a keno player?<\/A><br \/>\nAlso while in Vegas, Greg and I were arguing over the relarive merits (or lack thereof) of playing keno and the lottery.  There is an excellent website by <A \nHREF=\"http:\/\/mathforum.org\/dr.math\/faq\/\">Dr. Math<\/A> that has all kinds of goodies on math in everyday life situations.  The one dealing with <A \nHREF=\"http:\/\/mathforum.org\/dr.math\/faq\/faq.comb.perm.html\">combinations and permutations<\/A> is partiuclarly relevant for this question.  Both keno and regular<br \/>\nlotteries are examples of combinations, where the order does not matter (Powerball is a mix of combinations and permutations, since the powerball order does<br \/>\nmatter).  The formula is C(n,k)=n!\/(k!(n-k)!), where n is the number of objects to choose from, and k is number chosen.  For a lottery where you pick 6 numbers<br \/>\nout of 54, there are 54!\/(6!(54-6)!) possible combinations, which is 54*53*53*51*50*49\/(6*5*4*3*2), or a 1 in 25,827,165 chance of getting all six. In Keno,<br \/>\npicking 20 out of 80, there are 80!\/(20!(80-20)!) combinations, which is 80*79*&#8230;*62*61\/(20*19*&#8230;*2*1), or 3.535316142212174e+18.  That&#8217;s more than 3.5<br \/>\nquintillion to 1! That&#8217;s how they make the buffets so cheap!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who&#8217;s the bigger sucker, a lottery player or a keno player? Also while in Vegas, Greg and I were arguing over the relarive merits (or<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pekNN-m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}