If I buy two lottery tickets, do I really double my chances of winning? Does that cut the odds in half? Like instead of 1:300m it would be 1:150m?

each ticket increases your chances by 1:300m doubling your chances would mean to increase your chance to 2:300m aka buying a second ticket. this factor depends on the amount of entries you have.

the cut from 1:300m to 1:150m is depending on either the total amount of tickets or (how it is in most lottery systems) the chance of randomly guessing 6 right numbers. the amount of tickets you buy does not chance the total chance

the cut from 150 to 300 would refer to lowering the total amount of tickets. for example in a raffle, if there are 300 tickets, but 150 tickets go up in flames for no reason whatsoever, then your chances jump from 1:300 to 1:150. btw this is also not doubling or in other words increasing your chance by 100%, its actually increasing your chances by 15000% (this number is probably wrong because of some complicated math thingy i cant seem to see here, but its just an example anyway)

with the 6 random number lottery its a bit more complicated, because the chance depends on how many different combinations there are. simply reducing the amount of numbers from 50 to 25 wouldnt do the same as reducing the amount of tickets in a raffle, since those numbers get exponentially more combinations the more numbers are available. for example there is 1 combination for a single digit, 2 combinations for 2 digits, 6 combinations for 3 digits, 24 combinations for 4 digits etc. to accurately half the chance you need to make some complicated calculations and set up the lottery in a veery specific way, since its unlikely a single removed number will exactly divide the chance by half

/r/NoStupidQuestions Thread